Fandorin 1-10

‘Why d-do you say it’s unheard of?’ Fandorin replied with his habitual light stammer. ‘Japan began modernising in 1868, thirty-seven years ago. Less time than that passed from the moment Peter the Great ascended the throne until the battle of Poltava. Before that, there was no such power as Russia, then it suddenly sprang up out of nowhere, also like a m-mushroom, overnight.’

‘Oh, come on, that’s history,’ the general said dismissively, crossing himself with broad sweeps of his hand. ‘I’ll tell you what it is. It’s God punishing us for our sins. Punishing us harshly, as he did the Egyptian pharaoh, with miraculous disasters. So help me…’ – Leontii Karlovich glanced round at the door and dropped his voice to a whisper – ‘… we’ve lost the war.’

‘I d-don’t agree,’ Erast Petrovich snapped. ‘Not on a single point. Nothing miraculous has occurred. That is one. What has happened is only what should have been expected. It’s hardly surprising that Russia has not won a single battle. It would have been an absolute miracle if she had. Our enlisted man is no match for the Japanese soldier – he has less stamina, less learning and less martial spirit. Let us assume that the Russian officer is not bad, but the Japanese officer is simply superb. And then, what can we say about the generals (please don’t take this personally, Your Excellency); ours are fat and lack initiative, the Japanese generals are lean and forceful. If we are still holding out somehow, the only reason is that it is easier to defend than attack. But don’t be alarmed, Leontii Karpovich. We may lose the battles, but we shall win the war. And that is t-two. We are immeasurably stronger than the Japanese in the most important thing of all: we have economic might, human and natural resources. Time is on our side. Commander-in-Chief Linevich is acting entirely correctly, unlike Kuropatkin; he is drawing out the campaign, building up his strength. The longer it goes on, the weaker the Japanese become. Their treasury is on the brink of bankruptcy, their lines of communication are being extended further and further, their reserves are being drained. All we have to do is avoid large-scale battles, and victory is in the b-bag. Nothing could have been more stupid than to drag the Baltic fleet halfway round the world to be devoured by Admiral Togo.’

As the general listened to his assistant, his face grew brighter but, having begun on a bright note, Fandorin concluded his optimistic discourse on a gloomy one.

‘The crash on the Tezoimenitsky Bridge frightens me more than the loss of our navy squadron. Without a fleet, at least we will just about win the war, but if tricks like this start happening on the main railway line supplying the front, Russia is done for. Have them couple the inspector’s carriage to a locomotive. Let’s go and take a look.’

The fifth syllable, which features an interesting passenger

By the time the inspector’s carriage reached the scene of the disaster on the rocky banks of the Lomzha river, night had grown weary of pretending to be dark at all, and the clear morning light was streaming down from the sky in all its glory.

A quite incredible amount of top brass had gathered at the stub end of the Tezoimenitsky Bridge – the Minister of War, and the most august Inspector General of Artillery, and the Minister of Railways, and the Chief of the Gendarmes Corps, and the Director of the Department of Police, and the Head of the Provincial Gendarmes Department. There were as many as half a dozen saloon carriages, each with its own locomotive, drawn up one after another in a queue.

There, above the precipice, gold braid glittered, spurs and adjutant’s aiguillettes jingled, imperious bass voices rumbled peremptorily, and down below, at the water’s edge, chaos and death prevailed. Rising up in the middle of the Lomzha was a shapeless heap of wood and iron, with the broken bones of the bridge drooping down over it; one of the mangled and twisted locomotives had buried its nose in the far bank and was still smoking, while the rectangular black tender of the other protruded from the water like a cliff. The wounded had already been taken away, but there was a long line of dead lying on the sand, covered with tarpaulins.

The latest heavy guns, intended for the Manchurian army, had tumbled off the flat wagons: some had sunk and some had been scattered across the shallows. On the opposite bank a mobile crane was jerking its jib absurdly as it tugged at the mounting of a monster with a twisted barrel, but it was obvious that it could not cope and would never pull it out.

Leontii Karlovich set off towards the topmost brass, but Fandorin skirted round the islet of gold epaulettes and walked up to the very edge of the cliff. He stood there for a while, looking, then suddenly started climbing down the inclined surface. Down by the water, he leapt agilely on to the roof of a submerged carriage, and from there clambered on to the next support of the bridge, from which the crooked rails were dangling. The engineer scrambled up the sleepers as if they were the rungs of a ladder, and was soon on the far side of the river.

There were fewer people here. Standing some distance away, about fifty paces, was an express train – the one that had managed to slip across the bridge just before the collapse. The passengers were gathered in little knots beside the carriages.

On the surviving section of the bridge and beside the water, men in civilian clothes, all dressed differently but all, nonetheless, as alike as brothers, were swarming about with a businesslike air. Among them Fandorin recognised Evstratii Pavlovich Mylnikov, with whom he had once worked in Moscow.

A gendarme corporal in a wet, torn uniform was standing rigidly to attention in front of Mylnikov – it looked as if his report was already in full spate. But the court counsellor was not looking at the corporal, he was looking at Fandorin.

‘Bah,’ he said, throwing his arms wide, as if he was about to embrace the engineer. ‘Fandorin! What are you doing here? Ah, yes, you’re in the RGD now, they told me. Sorry for invading your territory, but it’s an order from the very top: investigate as a matter of emergency, involve all the contiguous departments. Got us up out of our feather bed. Go get ’em, they said, pick up that trail, you old bloodhound. Well, the part about the feather bed’s not true.’ Mylnikov bared his yellow teeth in what should have been a smile, but his eyes remained cold and narrowed. ‘When would humble sleuths like us ever see our feather beds these days? I envy you railway sybarites. I spent the night on the chairs in the office, as I usually do. But then again, as you can see, I got here first. Look, I’m interrogating your lads, to see if it was a Japanese mine.’

‘Mr Engineer,’ the corporal said excitedly, turning to Fandorin, ‘tell His Honour, will you? Do you remember me? I’m Loskutov, I use to work in Farforovaya, on the crossing. You inspected us in winter and you were well pleased. You gave orders for me to be promoted. I did everything all right and proper, just like we’re supposed to! I climbed over the whole lot myself, ten minutes before the express. It was all clear! And how could the enemy have crept through on to the bridge? I’ve got sentries at both ends!’

‘So it was completely clear?’ Fandorin asked to make certain. ‘Did you look carefully?’

‘Why, I… Just look at that…’ The corporal choked and tugged his peaked cap off his head. ‘By Christ the Lord! Seven years… You ask anyone you like how Loskutov does his duty.’

The engineer turned to Mylnikov:

‘What have you managed to find out?’

‘The picture’s clear,’ Mylnikov said with a shrug. ‘The usual old Rooshian nonsense. The express train was travelling in front. It stopped at Kolpino and was supposed to let the special with the field guns go past. Then this telegraph clerk passes on a telegram: Carry on, the special’s delayed. Someone messed things up somewhere. As soon as the express has cleared the bridge, the army train catches up with it from behind. A heavy brute, as you can see for yourself. Should have shot across at full speed, as required, then nothing would have happened. But it must have started to brake, and the supports caved in. The railway top brass will be in for it now.’

‘Who sent the telegram about the special b-being delayed?’ asked Fandorin, leaning forward eagerly.

‘Well, that’s just it. No one sent any such telegram.’

‘And where’s the telegraph clerk who supposedly received it?’

‘We’re searching. Haven’t found him yet – his shift was already over.’

The corner of the engineer’s mouth twitched.

‘You’re not searching hard enough. Get a verbal portrait, a photo if you can, and put him on the all-Russian wanted list, urgently.’

‘The telegraph clerk? On the all-Russian list?’

Fandorin beckoned the court counsellor with his finger, took him aside and said in a quiet voice:

‘This is sabotage. The bridge was blown up.’

‘How do you make that out?’

Fandorin led the sleuths’ boss across to the break and started climbing down the dangling rails. Mylnikov clambered after him, gasping and crossing himself.

‘L-look.’

The hand in the grey glove pointed to a charred and splintered sleeper and a rail twisted like a paper streamer.

‘Our experts will arrive any minute now. They are certain to discover particles of explosive…’

Mylnikov whistled and pushed his bowler hat on to the back of his head.

The detectives hung there above the black water, swaying slightly on the improvised ladder.

‘So the gendarme’s lying when he says he inspected everything? Or even worse, he’s in on it? Shall we arrest him?’

‘Loskutov – a Japanese agent? Rubbish. Then he would have run for it, like the Kolpino t-telegraph clerk. No, no, there wasn’t any mine on the line.’

‘Then how’d it happen? There wasn’t any mine, but there was an explosion?’

‘That’s the way it is, though.’

The court counsellor frowned thoughtfully and set off up the sleepers.

‘Go and report this to the top brass… Now won’t there be a real song and dance.’

He waved to the agents and shouted:

‘Hey, get me a boat!’

However, he didn’t get into the boat, he changed his mind.

He watched Fandorin walking away towards the express train, scratched the back of his head and went dashing after him.

The engineer glanced round at the sound of tramping feet and nodded towards the motionless train.

‘Was there really such a small distance between the trains?’

‘No, the express halted farther along, on the emergency brake. Then the driver reversed. The conductors and some of the passengers helped to get the wounded out of the water. It’s not so far to a station this side as on the other. They drove a farm cart over and took them off to hospital…’

Fandorin summoned the conductor-in-chief with an imperious gesture and asked:

‘How many passengers on the train?’

‘All the seats were sold, Mr Engineer. That makes three hundred and twelve. I’m sorry, but when can we get moving again?’

Two of the passengers were standing quite close by: an army staff captain and an attractive-looking lady. Both covered from head to foot in mud and green slime. The officer was pouring water on to his companion’s handkerchief from a kettle, and she was energetically scrubbing her mud-smeared face. Both of them were listening to the conversation curiously.

A platoon of railway gendarmes approached at a trot from the bridge. The commanding officer ran up first and saluted.

‘Mr Engineer, we’re here at your disposal. There are two platoons on the other bank. The experts have started work. What will our orders be?’

‘Cordon off both sides of the bridge and the banks. Let no one near the break, not even if they hold the rank of general. Otherwise we renounce all responsibility for the investigation – tell them that. Tell Sigismund Lvovich to look for traces of explosive… But no, don’t bother, he’ll see that for himself. Give me a clerk and four of your brightest soldiers. Yes, and one more thing: put a cordon round the express train as well. Let none of the passengers or train staff through without my permission.’

‘Mr Engineer,’ the captain of the train’s crew exclaimed plaintively, ‘we’ve been standing here for over four hours.’

‘And you’ll b-be standing here for a long time yet. I have to draw up a complete list of the passengers. We’ll question all of them and check their credentials. We’ll start from the final carriage. And you, Mylnikov, would do better to turn your attention to that telegraph clerk who disappeared. I can manage things here without you.’

‘Of course, right enough, it’s your move,’ said Mylnikov, and he even waved his arms, as if to say: I’m leaving, I’m not claiming any rights here. However, he didn’t leave.

‘Sir, madam,’ the conductor-in-chief said to the officer and lady in a dejected voice. ‘Please be so good as to return to your seats. Did you hear? They’re going to check your documents.’

‘Disaster, Glyceria Romanovna,’ Rybnikov whispered. ‘I’m done for.’

Lidina gasped as she examined a lace cuff stained with blood, but then jerked her head up sharply.

‘Why? What’s happened?’

In those slightly red and yet still beautiful eyes, Vasilii Alexandrovich read an immediate readiness for action and once again, after all the numerous occasions during the night, he marvelled at the unpredictability of this capital-city cutie.

The way Glyceria Romanovna had behaved during the efforts to save the drowning and wounded had been absolutely astounding: she didn’t sob and wail, or throw a fit of hysterics; in fact she didn’t cry at all, simply bit on her bottom lip at the most painful moments, so that by dawn it had swollen up quite badly. Rybnikov shook his head as he watched the frail little lady dragging a wounded soldier out of the water and binding up his bleeding wound with a narrow rag torn off her silk dress.

Once, overcome by the sight, the staff captain had murmured to himself: ‘It’s like Nekrasov, that poem “Russian Women”’. And he glanced around quickly, to see whether anyone had heard this comment that fitted so badly with the image of a grey little runt of an officer.

After Vasilii Alexandrovich had saved her from the dark-complexioned neurasthenic, and especially after several hours of working together, Lidina had started acting quite naturally with the staff captain, as if he were an old friend – she, too, had evidently changed her opinion of her travelling companion.

‘Why, what’s happened? Tell me!’ she exclaimed, gazing at Rybnikov with fright in her eyes.

‘I’m done for all round,’ Vasilii Alexandrovich whispered, taking her by the arm and leading her slowly towards the train. ‘I went to Peter without authorisation, my superiors didn’t know about it. My sister’s unwell. Now they’ll find out – it’s a catastrophe…’

‘The guardhouse, is it?’ Lidina asked, distressed.

‘Never mind the guardhouse, that’s no great disaster. The terrible part is something else altogether… Remember you asked about my tube? Just before the explosion? Well, I really did leave it in the toilet. I’m always so absentminded.’

Glyceria Romanovna put her hand over her lips and asked in a terrible whisper:

‘Secret drawings?’

‘Yes. Very important. Even when I went absent without leave, I didn’t let them out of my sight for a moment.’

‘And where are they? Haven’t you taken a look there, in the toilet?’

‘They’ve disappeared,’ Vasilii Alexandrovich said in a sepulchral voice, and hung his head. ‘Someone took them. That’s not just the guardhouse, it means a trial, under martial law.’

‘How appalling!’ said the lady, round-eyed with horror. ‘What can be done?’

‘I want to ask you something,’ said Rybnikov, stopping as they reached the final carriage. ‘Before anyone’s looking, I’ll duck in under the wheels and afterwards I’ll choose my moment to slip down the embankment and into the bushes. I can’t afford to be checked. Don’t give me away, will you? Tell them you’ve got no idea where I went to. We didn’t talk during the journey. What would you want with a rough type like me? And take my little suitcase that’s on the rack with you, I’ll call round to collect it in Moscow. Ostozhenka Street, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, the Bomze building.’

Lidina glanced round at the big boss from St Petersburg and the gendarmes, who were also moving towards the train.

‘Will you help me out, save me?’ asked Rybnikov, stepping into the shadow of the carriage.

‘Of course!’ A determined, even reckless expression appeared on Glyceria Romanovna’s little face – just like earlier, when she had made a dash for the emergency brake. ‘I know who stole your drawings! That repulsive specimen who attacked me! That’s why he was in such a great hurry! And I wouldn’t be surprised if he blew up the bridge too!’

‘Blew it up?’ Rybnikov gasped in amazement, struggling to keep up with what she was saying. ‘How do you make that out? How could he blow it up?’

‘How should I know, I’m not a soldier! Perhaps he threw some kind of bomb out of the window! I’ll save you all right! And there’s no need to go crawling under the carriage!’ she shouted, darting off towards the gendarmes so impulsively that the staff captain was too late to hold her back, even though he tried.

‘Who’s in charge here? You?’ Lidina asked, running up to the elegant gentleman with the grey temples. ‘I have important news!’

Screwing his eyes up in alarm, Rybnikov glanced under the carriage, but it was too late to duck in under there now – many eyes were already gazing in his direction. The staff captain gritted his teeth and set off after Lidina.

She was holding the man with grey hair by the sleeve of his summer coat and jabbering away at incredible speed:

‘I know who you want! There was a man here, an obnoxious type with dark hair, vulgarly dressed, with a diamond ring – a huge stone, but not pure water. Terribly suspicious! In a terrible hurry to get to Moscow. Absolutely everybody stayed, and lots of them helped get the men out of the river, but he grabbed his travelling bag and left. When the first wagon arrived from the station for the wounded, he bribed the driver. He gave him money, a lot of money, and drove away. And he didn’t take a wounded man with him!’

‘Why, that’s true,’ the captain of the train put in. ‘A passenger from the second carriage, compartment number six. I saw him give the peasant a hundred-rouble note – for a wagon! And he rode off to the station.’

‘Oh, be quiet, will you, I haven’t finished yet!’ Lidina said, gesturing at him angrily. ‘I heard him ask that peasant: “Is there a shunting engine at the station?” He wanted to hire the engine, to get away as quickly as possible! I tell you, he was terribly suspicious!’

Rybnikov listened anxiously, expecting that now she would tell them about the stolen tube, but clever Glyceria Romanovna kept quiet about that highly suspicious circumstance, astounding the staff captain yet again.

‘A m-most interesting passenger,’ the gentleman with the grey temples said thoughtfully, and gestured briskly to a gendarmes officer. ‘Lieutenant! Send to the other side. My Chinese servant is across there in the inspector’s carriage, you know him. Tell him to come at the d-double. I’ll be at the station.’

And he strode off rapidly along the train.

‘But what about the express, Mr Fandorin?’ the lieutenant shouted after him.

‘Send it on its way!’ the man with the stammer shouted back without stopping.

A dull fellow with a simple sort of face and a dangling moustache who was hanging about nearby snapped his fingers – two nondescript little men came running up to him, and the three of them started whispering to each other.

Glyceria Romanovna returned to Rybnikov victorious.

‘There now, you see, it’s all settled. No need for you to go chasing through the bushes like a hare. And your drawings will turn up.’

But the staff captain wasn’t looking at her, he was looking at the back of the man whom the lieutenant had called ‘Fandorin’. Vasilii Alexandrovich’s yellowish face was like a frozen mask, and there were strange glimmers of light flickering in his eyes.

NAKA-NO-KU

The first syllable, in which Vasilii Alexandrovich takes leave

They said goodbye as friends and, of course, not for ever – Rybnikov promised that as soon as he was settled in, he would definitely come to visit.

‘Yes, do, please,’ Lidina said severely, shaking his hand. ‘I’ll be worried about that tube of yours.’

The staff captain assured her that he would wriggle out of it somehow now and parted from the delightful lady with mixed feelings of regret and relief, of which the latter was by far the stronger.

After shaking his head to drive away inappropriate thoughts, the first thing he did was pay a visit to the telegraph office at the station. A telegram was waiting there for him to collect: ‘Management congratulates brilliant success objections withdrawn may commence project receive goods information follows’.

Apparently this acknowledgement of his achievements, plus the withdrawal of certain objections, was very important to Rybnikov. His face brightened up and he even started singing a song about a toreador.

Something in the staff captain’s manner changed. His uniform still sat on him baggily (after the adventures of the night, it had become even shabbier), but Vasilii Alexandrovich’s shoulders had straightened up, the expression in his eyes was more lively, and he wasn’t dragging his leg any more.

Running up the stairs to the second floor, where the offices were located, he seated himself on a broad windowsill offering a clear view of the entire wide, empty corridor and took out a notebook with pages full of aphorisms for every occasion in life. These included the old byword: ‘A bullet’s a fool, a bayonet’s a fine fellow’ and ‘The Russian harnesses up slowly, but he rides fast’ and ‘Anyone who’s drunk and clever has two landholdings in him’, and the last of the maxims that had caught Vasilii Alexandrovich’s interest was: ‘You may be Ivanov the Seventh, but you’re a fool. A. P. Chekhov’.

Chekhov was followed by blank pages, but the staff captain took out a flat little bottle of colourless liquid, shook a drop on to the paper and rubbed it with his finger, and strange symbols that looked like intertwined snakes appeared on the page. He did the same thing with the next few pages – and the outlandish squiggles came wriggling out of nowhere on to them as well. Rybnikov studied them closely for some time. Then he thought for a while, moving his lips and memorising something. And after another minute or two the serpentine scribbles disappeared all by themselves.

He went back to the telegraph office and sent off two urgent telegrams – to Samara and Krasnoyarsk. The content of both was identical: a request to come to Moscow ‘on agreed business’ on 25 May and a statement that a room had been booked in ‘the same hotel’. The staff captain signed himself with the name ‘Ivan Goncharov’.

And with that, urgent business was apparently concluded. Vasilii Alexandrovich went downstairs to the restaurant and dined with a good appetite, without counting the kopecks – he even allowed himself cognac. He also gave the waiter a tip that was not extravagant, but quite respectable.

And that was only the start of this army scarecrow’s miraculous transformation.

From the station, the staff captain went to a clothing shop on Kuznetsky Most. He told the salesman that he had been discharged ‘for good’ when he was wounded, and wished to acquire a decent wardrobe.

He bought two good summer suits, several pairs of trousers, shoes with spats and American ankle boots, an English cap, a straw boater and half a dozen shirts. He changed there, put the tattered uniform away in his suitcase and told them to wrap his sword in paper.

And then there was this: Rybnikov arrived at the shop in a plain, ordinary cab, but he drove off in a lacquered four-wheeler, the kind that charge you fifty kopecks just for getting in.

The dapper passenger got out at Vuchtel’s typographical emporium and told the driver not to wait for him. He had to pick up an order – a hundred cartes de visite in the name of a correspondent from the Reuters telegraph agency, and, moreover, the first name and patronymic on the cards were his, Rybnikov’s – Vasilii Alexandrovich – but the surname was quite different: Sten.

And the freshly minted Mr Sten (but no, in order to avoid confusion, let him remain Rybnikov) made his departure from there on a regular five-rouble rocket, telling the driver to deliver him to the Saint-Saлns boarding house, but first to call in somewhere for a bunch of white lilies. The driver, a real sport, nodded respectfully: ‘Understood, sir.’

The railings of the absolutely charming empire-style villa ran along the actual boulevard. If the garland of small coloured lanterns decorating the gates was anything to go by, the boarding house must have looked especially festive during the evening hours. But just at the moment the courtyard and the stand for carriages were empty and the tall windows were filled with the blank white of lowered curtains.

Rybnikov asked whether this was Countess Bovada’s house and handed the doorman his card. Less than a minute later a rather portly lady emerged from the depths of the house, which proved to be far more spacious on the inside than it appeared to be from the outside. No longer young, but not yet old, she was very well groomed and made up so skilfully that it would have taken an experienced eye to spot any traces of cosmetic subterfuge.

At the sight of Rybnikov, the countess’s slightly predatory features seemed to tighten and shrink for a brief moment, but then they immediately beamed in a gracious smile.

‘My dear friend! My highly esteemed…’ – she squinted sideways at the calling card. ‘My highly esteemed Vasilii Alexandrovich! I am absolutely delighted to see you! And you haven’t forgotten that I love white lilies! How sweet!’

‘I never forget anything, Madam Beatrice,’ said the former staff captain, pressing his lips to the hand that glittered with rings.

At these words his hostess involuntarily touched her magnificent ash-blonde hair, arranged in a tall style, and glanced in concern at the back of the gallant visitor’s lowered head. But when Rybnikov straightened up, the charming smile was beaming once again on the countess’s plump lips.

In the decor of the salon and the corridors, pastel tones were prevalent, with the gilt frames of copies of Watteau and Fragonard gleaming on the walls. This rendered even more impressive the contrast with the study to which Her Excellency led her visitor: no frivolity or affectation here – a writing desk with account books, a bureau, a rack for papers. It was obvious that the countess was a thoroughly businesslike individual, and not in the habit of wasting time idly.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, taking a seat in an armchair and crossing his legs. ‘Everything is in order. They are pleased with you, you are as useful here as you were previously in Port Arthur and Vladivostok. I have not come to you on business. You know, I’m tired. I decided to take a period of leave, live quietly for a while.’ He smiled cheerfully. ‘I know from experience that the wilder things are around me, the calmer I feel.’

Countess Beauvade took offence.

‘This is not some wild place, this is the best-run establishment in the city! After only a year of work my guest house has acquired an excellent reputation! Very respectable people come to us, people who value decorum and calm.’

‘I know, I know,’ Rybnikov interrupted her, still with the same smile. ‘That is precisely why I came straight here from the train, dear Beatrice. Decorum and calm are exactly what I need. I won’t be in the way, will I?’

His hostess replied very seriously.

‘You shouldn’t talk like that. I’m entirely at your disposal.’ She hesitated for a moment and asked delicately, ‘Perhaps you would like to relax with one of the young ladies? We have some capital ones. I promise you’ll forget your tiredness.’

‘I’d better not,’ said the telegraph correspondent, declining politely. ‘I may have to stay with you for two or three weeks. If I enter into a special relationship with one of your… boarders, it could lead to jealousy and squabbling. We don’t want that.’

Beatrice nodded to acknowledge the reasonableness of his argument.

‘I’ll put you in a three-room apartment with a separate entrance. It’s a section for clients who are prepared to pay for total privacy. That will be the most convenient place for you.’

‘Excellent. Naturally, your losses will be reimbursed.’

‘Thank you. In addition to being secluded from the main part of the house, where it is sometimes quite noisy at night, the apartment has other conveniences. The rooms are connected by secret doors, which might prove apposite.’

Rybnikov chuckled.

‘I bet it also has false mirrors, conveniently positioned for taking photographs in secret. Like in Arthur, remember?’

The countess smiled and said nothing.

Rybnikov was pleased with his apartment. He spent a few hours arranging it, but not at all in the usual meaning of that word. His domestic bustle had nothing to do with the cosy comforts of home.

Vasilii Alexandrovich went to bed after midnight and took a right royal rest, the kind he had not had in a long time – he slept for an entire four hours, twice as long as usual.

The second syllable, in which Masa violates his neutrality

The passenger from compartment number six did not disappoint Erast Petrovich. On the contrary, the theory appeared ever more promising as time went on.

At the station Fandorin found the driver of the wagon that had transported the passenger who was in such a great hurry away from the banks of the Lomzha. The pretty lady’s testimony was confirmed when the peasant said that the German had indeed forked out a hundred roubles.

‘Why do you say he is German?’ the engineer asked.

The driver was surprised.

‘Well, why would any Russian shell out a hundred note when the price is fifteen kopecks at the outside?’ Then he thought and added, ‘And he had a queer way of speaking too.’

‘Exactly how was it “queer”?’ Erast Petrovich enquired eagerly, but the local couldn’t explain that.

It was much harder to establish where the dark-haired man had gone on to from there. The stationmaster claimed ignorance, the duty supervisor bleated and avoided Fandorin’s eyes, the local gendarme stood to attention and pretended to be a total imbecile. Then, recalling what his invaluable witness had said, the engineer asked point blank where the shunting engine was.

The gendarme instantly came out in large beads of sweat, the duty supervisor turned pale and the stationmaster turned red.

It turned out that the engine, in contravention of all the rules and regulations, had borne the dark-haired man off, full steam ahead, in pursuit of the passenger train that had passed through an hour ahead of the express. The berserk passenger (concerning his nationality, the opinions of the witnesses differed: the stationmaster thought he was a Frenchman, the duty supervisor thought he was a Pole, and the gendarme thought he was a ‘Yid boy’) had thrown so much money about in all directions that it was impossible to resist.

No doubts remained: this was the man Fandorin wanted.

The train that the interesting passenger had set out to chase arrived in Moscow at a quarter to ten, so there was just barely enough time left.

The engineer sent a telegram to the Moscow representative of the Department and an identical one to the head of the Volokolamsk section, Lieutenant Colonel Danilov, telling them to meet the suspect (there follow a detailed description) at the station but not to detain him under any circumstances, simply assign the smartest plainclothes agents they had to shadow him; and to do nothing more until Erast Petrovich arrived.

Because of the wreck, all traffic on the Nicholas line had come to a halt. A long queue of passenger and goods trains had formed in the St Petersburg direction, but in the Moscow direction the line was clear. Fandorin requisitioned the very latest five-axle ‘compound engine’ locomotive and, accompanied by his faithful valet, set off to the east at a speed of eighty versts an hour.

Erast Petrovich had last been in his native city five years earlier – in secret, under an assumed name. The higher authorities of Moscow were not fond of the retired state counsellor; indeed, they disliked him so greatly that even the briefest of stays in Russia’s second capital city could end very unpleasantly for him.

After Fandorin returned to government service without any of the normal formalities being observed, an extremely strange situation had arisen: although he enjoyed the confidence of the government and was invested with extremely wide-ranging powers, the engineer continued to be regarded as persona non grata in the province of Moscow and endeavoured not to extend his journeys beyond the station of Bologoe.

But shortly after the New Year an incident had occurred that put an end to these years of exile, and if Erast Petrovich had not yet got around to visiting his native parts, it was only because of his extraordinarily excessive workload.

Standing beside the driver and gazing absentmindedly into the hot blaze of the firebox, Fandorin thought about the imminent encounter with the city of his youth and the event that had made this encounter possible.

It was an event that shook Moscow, in the literal sense as well as the figurative one. The governor-general of Moscow, Fandorin’s bitter enemy, had been blown to pieces by a Social Revolutionary bomb right in the middle of the Kremlin.

For all his dislike of the deceased, a man of little worth, who had caused only harm to the city, Erast Petrovich was shocked by what had happened.

Russia was seriously ill, running a high fever, shivering hot and cold by turns, with bloody sweat oozing from her pores, and it was not just a matter of the war with Japan. The war had merely brought to light what was already clear in any case to any thinking individual: the empire had become an anachronism, a dinosaur with a body that was huge and a head that was too small, a creature that had outlived its time on earth. Or rather, the actual dimensions of the head were huge, it was swollen up with a multitude of ministries and committees, but hidden at the centre of this head was a tiny little brain, uncomplicated by any convolutions. Any decision that was even slightly complex, any movement of the unwieldy carcass, was impossible without a decision of will by a single individual whose wisdom, unfortunately, fell far short of Solomon’s. But even if he had been an intellectual titan, how was it possible, in the age of electricity, radio and X-rays, to govern a country single-handed, during the breaks between lawn tennis and hunting?

So the poor Russian dinosaur was reeling, tripping over its own mighty feet, dragging its thousand-verst tail aimlessly across the earth. An agile predator of the new generation sprang at it repeatedly, tearing out lumps of flesh, and deep in the entrails of the behemoth, a deadly tumour was burgeoning. Fandorin did not know how to heal the ailing giant, but in any case bombs were not the answer – the jarring concussion would totally confuse the immense saurian’s tiny little brain, the gigantic body would start twitching convulsively in panic, and Russia would die.

As usual, it was the wisdom of the East that helped purge his gloomy and barren thoughts. The engineer fished out of his memory an aphorism that suited the case: ‘The superior man knows that the world is imperfect, but does not lose heart’.

The factor that had disrupted the harmony of Erast Petrovich’s soul should be arriving at the Nicholas station in Moscow any minute now.

He could only hope that Lieutenant Colonel Danilov would not blunder…

Danilov did not blunder. He met his visitor from St Petersburg in person, right beside the reserve line at which the ‘compound’ arrived. The lieutenant colonel’s round face was glowing with excitement. As soon as they had shaken hands he started his report.

He didn’t have a single good agent – they had all been lured into the Okhrana’s Flying Squad, where the pay and the gratuities were better, and there was more freedom. And therefore, knowing that the engineer would not have alarmed him over something trivial, Danilov had decided to reprise the good old days, taken his deputy, Staff Captain Lisitsky, a very capable officer, to help him and followed the mark himself.

Now the engineer understood the reason for bold Nikolai Vasilievich’s agitation. The lieutenant colonel had had enough of sitting in his office, he was weary of having no real work to do, that was why he had gone dashing off so eagerly to play cops and robbers. ‘I’ll have to tell them to transfer him to work in the field,’ Fandorin noted to himself as he listened to the adventurous tale of how Danilov and his deputy had dressed up as petty merchants and how deftly they had arranged the surveillance in two cabs.

‘In Petrovsko-Razumovskoe?’ he asked in surprise. ‘In that d-dump?’

‘Ah, Erast Petrovich, it’s easy to see you haven’t been around for quite a while. Petrovsko-Razumovskoe’s a fashionable dacha district now. For instance, the dacha to which we trailed the dark-haired man is rented by a certain Alfred Radzikovski for a thousand roubles a month.’

‘A thousand?’ Fandorin echoed in astonishment. ‘What kind of Fontainebleau is that?’

‘A Fontainebleau is exactly what it is. A huge great garden with its own stables, even a garage. I left the staff captain to continue the surveillance, he has two corporals with him, in civvies, naturally. Reliable men but, of course, not professional sleuths.’

‘Let’s go,’ the engineer said briskly.

Lisitsky – a handsome fellow with a rakishly curled moustache – proved to be a very capable fellow. He hadn’t wasted his time sitting in the bushes, he had found out a great deal.

‘They live on a grand scale,’ he reported, occasionally slipping into a Polish accent. ‘Electricity, telephone, even their own telegraph apparatus. A bathroom with a shower! Two carriages with thoroughbred trotters! An automobile in the garage! A gym with exercise bicycles! Servants in lace pinafores! Parrots this size in the winter garden!’

‘How do you know about the parrots?’ Fandorin asked incredulously.

‘Why, I was there,’ Staff Captain Lisitsky replied with a cunning air. ‘I tried to get a job as a gardener. They didn’t take me – said they already had one. But they let me take a peep into the conservatory – one of them is a great lover of plants.’

‘One?’ the engineer asked quickly. ‘How many are there?’

‘I don’t know, but it’s a fair-sized group. I heard about half a dozen voices. And, by the way, between themselves they talk Polish.’

‘But what about?’ the lieutenant colonel exclaimed. ‘You know the language!’

The young officer shrugged.

‘They didn’t say anything significant with me there. They praised the dark-haired bloke for something, called him a “real daredevil”. By the way, his name’s Yuzek.’

‘They’re Polish nationalists from the Socialist Party, I’m sure of it!’ Danilov exclaimed. ‘I read about them in a secret circular. They’ve got mixed up with the Japanese, who promised to make independence for Poland a condition if they win. Their leader went to Tokyo recently. What’s his name again…’

‘Pilsudski,’ said Erast Petrovich, examining the dacha through a pair of binoculars.

‘That’s it, Pilsudski. He must have got money in Japan, and instructions.’

‘It l-looks like it…’

Something was stirring at the dacha. A blond man standing by the window in a collarless shirt with wide braces shouted something into a telephone. A door slammed loudly once, twice. Horses started neighing.

‘It looks like they’re getting ready for something,’ Lisitsky whispered in the engineer’s ear. ‘They started moving about half an hour ago now.’

‘The Japs’ spies don’t seem any too bothered about us,’ the lieutenant colonel boomed in his other ear. ‘Of course, our counter-espionage is pretty lousy, right enough, but this is just plain cheeky: setting themselves up in comfort like this, five minutes away from the Nicholas railway station. Wouldn’t I just love to nab the little darlings right now. A pity it’s out of our jurisdiction. The Okhrana boys and the provincial gendarmes will eat us alive. If they were on the railway right of way, now that would be a different matter.’

‘I tell you what we can do,’ Lisitsky suggested. ‘We’ll call our platoon and put the dacha under siege, but we won’t take it, we’ll inform the police. Then they won’t make any fuss about it.’

Fandorin didn’t join in the discussion – he was turning his head this way and that, trying to spot something. He fixed his gaze on a freshly trimmed wooden pole sticking up out of the ground beside the road.

‘A telephone pole… We could listen to what they’re saying…’

‘How?’ the lieutenant colonel asked in surprise.

‘Tap the line, from the pole.’

‘Sorry, Erast Petrovich, I don’t have a clue about technical matters. What does “tap the line” mean?

Fandorin, however, didn’t bother to explain anything – he had already made his decision.

‘One of the platforms on our Nicholas line is c-close by here…’

‘That’s right, the Petrovsko-Razumovskoe way station.’

‘There must be a telephone apparatus there. Send a gendarme. But be quick, don’t waste a second. He runs in, cuts the wire right at the wall, takes the telephone and comes straight back. No wasting time on explanations, he just shows his identification document, that’s all. At the double, now!’

A few moments later they heard the tramping of rapidly receding boots as the corporal rushed off to carry out his mission. About ten minutes after that he came dashing back with the severed telephone and wire.

‘Lucky it’s so long,’ the engineer said happily, and astounded the gendarmes by taking off his elegant coat, clutching a folding penknife in his teeth and shinning up the pole.

After fiddling with the wires for a bit, he came back down, holding the earpiece in his hands, with its wire leading up into the air.

‘Take it,’ he said to the staff captain. ‘Since you know Polish, you can do the listening.’

Lisitsky was filled with admiration.

‘What a brilliant idea, Mr Engineer! How incredible that no one ever thought of it before! Why, you could set up a special office at the telephone exchange! Listen to what suspicious individuals are saying! What tremendous benefit for the fatherland! And so very civilised, in the spirit of technological progr…’ The officer broke off in mid-word, raised a warning finger and informed them in a terrible whisper, ‘They’re calling! The central exchange!’

The lieutenant colonel and the engineer leaned forward eagerly.

‘A man… asking for number 398…’ Lisitsky whispered jerkily. ‘Another man… Speaking Polish… The first one’s arranging to meet… No, it’s a gathering… On Novo-Basmannaya Street… In the Varvarin Company building… An operation! He said “operation”! That’s it, he cut the connection.’

‘What kind of operation?’ asked Danilov, grabbing his deputy by the shoulder.

‘He didn’t say. Just “the operation”, that’s all. At midnight, and it’s almost half past nine already. No wonder they’re bustling about like that.’

‘On Basmannaya? The Varvarin Company Building?’ Erast Petrovich repeated, also whispering without even realising it. ‘What’s there, do you know?’

The officers exchanged glances and shrugged.

‘We need an address b-book.’

They sent the same corporal running back to the way station – to dart into the office, grab the All Moscow guidebook off the desk and leg it back as quickly as possible.

‘The men at the way station will think the railway gendarme service is full of head cases,’ the lieutenant colonel lamented, but mostly for form’s sake. ‘Never mind, we’ll return it all afterwards – the telephone and the book.’

The next ten minutes passed in tense anticipation, with them almost tearing the binoculars out of each other’s hands. They couldn’t see all that well because it was starting to get dark, but all the lights were on in the dacha and hasty shadows flitted across the curtains.

The three of them went dashing to meet the panting corporal. Erast Petrovich, as the senior in rank, grabbed the tattered volume. First he checked what telephone number 398 was. It proved to be the Great Moscow Hotel. He moved on to the Listing of Buildings section, opened it at Novo-Basmannaya Street, and the blood started pounding in his temples.

The building that belonged to the Varvarin Company contained the administrative offices of the District Artillery Depot.

The lieutenant colonel glanced over the engineer’s shoulder and gasped.

‘Why, of course! Why didn’t I realise straight away… Novo-Basmannaya Street. That’s where they have the warehouses for the shells and dynamite that they send to the army in the field! They always have at least a week’s supply of ammunition! But, gentlemen, that’s… Why, it’s unheard of! Monstrous! If they’re planning to blow it up – almost half of Moscow will be blown to pieces! Why, those lousy Poles! Begging your pardon, Boleslav Stefanovich, I didn’t mean…’

‘What can you expect from socialists,’ said Staff Captain Lisitsky, interceding for his nation. ‘Pawns in the hands of the Japanese, that’s all. But what about those Orientals! Genuine new Huns! Absolutely no concept of civilised warfare!’

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ Danilov interrupted, with his eyes blazing. ‘There’s a silver lining to this cloud! The artillery stores adjoin the workshops of the Kazan railway, and that’s…’

‘… that’s our territory!’ Lisitsky concluded for him. ‘Bravo, Nikolai Vasilievich! We’ll get by without the provincials!’

‘And without the Okhrana!’ his boss said with a predatory smile.

The lieutenant colonel and the staff captain worked a genuine miracle of efficiency: in two hours they set up a sound, thoroughly planned ambush. They didn’t trail the saboteurs from Petrovsko-Razumovskoe – that was too risky. At night the lanes in the dacha village were empty and, as luck would have it, the moon was shining with all its might. It was more rational to concentrate all their efforts at a single spot, where the plotters had arranged their gathering.

Danilov brought out all the current members of the section for the operation, apart from those who were standing duty – sixty-seven men altogether.

Most of the gendarmes were set around the inside of the depot’s perimeter wall, with orders to ‘lie there quietly and not stick their heads up’. Lisitsky was the man in command on the spot. The lieutenant colonel himself took ten of his best men and hid in the management building.

To obtain permission for the railway gendarmes to run their own show on the territory of the artillery administration, they had to get the Director of Depositories, an old general who had fought against Shamil some fifty years previously, out of his bed. He got so agitated that it never even entered his head to nitpick about the finer points of jurisdiction – he just agreed to everything immediately and kept swallowing heart drops all the time.

Seeing that Danilov was managing perfectly well without him, the engineer distanced himself from the supervision of the ambush. He and Masa stationed themselves in an entrance opposite the gates of the depot. Fandorin chose the spot quite deliberately. If the gendarmes, who were not used to this kind of operation, let any of the saboteurs get away, then Erast Petrovich would block their path, and they would not get away from him! However, Danilov, elated by the preparations, understood the engineer’s decision in his own way, and a note of slight condescension appeared in the lieutenant colonel’s tone of voice, as if to say: Well, of course, I’m not criticising, you’re a civilian, you’re not obliged to put yourself in the way of a bullet.

Just as soon as everyone had taken up their positions and the nervous general had followed instructions by putting out the light in his office before pressing his face up against the windowpane, they heard the chiming of the clock in the tower on Kalanchovskaya Square, and a minute later three open carriages came rolling into the street from two directions – two from the Ryazan Passage and one from the Yelokhovsky Passage. The carriages met in front of the administration building and men got out of them (Fandorin counted five, and another three who stayed on the coach boxes). They started whispering to each other about something.

The engineer took out of his pocket a beautiful small, flat pistol, manufactured to order at the Browning factory in Belgium, and tugged on the breech. His valet demonstratively turned away.

Well then, come on, Erast Petrovich thought to himself, trying to hurry the Poles along, and sighed – there was not much hope that Danilov’s fine eagles would take anyone alive. But never mind, at least one of the villains had to stay with the horses. The lucky man would escape a gendarme’s bullet and fall into Fandorin’s hands.

The discussions ended. But instead of moving towards the doors of the administration building or straight to the gates, the saboteurs got back into their carriages, cracked their whips and all three carriages dashed away from the depot, picking up speed, in the direction of Dobraya Sloboda.

Had they noticed something? Had they changed their plan?

Erast Petrovich ran out of the gateway.

The carriages had already disappeared round the corner.

The engineer pulled his splendid coat off his shoulders and set off at a run in the same direction.

His servant picked up the abandoned coat and jogged after him, puffing and panting.

When Lieutenant Colonel Danilov and his gendarmes darted out on to the porch, Novo-Basmannaya Street was already empty. The sound of hoofbeats had faded into the distance, and the moon was shining placidly in the sky.

It turned out that Erast Petrovich Fandorin, a responsible member of a highly serious government agency, a man no longer in the prime of youth, could not only shin up telephone poles, but could also run at a quite fantastic speed, while making no sound and remaining virtually invisible – he ran close to the walls, where the shadows of night were thickest of all, skirting round the patches of moonlight or vaulting over them with a prodigious leap. More than anything else, the engineer resembled a phantom, careering along the dark street on some otherworldly business of his own. It was a good thing he didn’t run into anybody out walking late – the poor devil would have been in for a serious shock.

Fandorin caught up with the carriages quite soon. After that he started running more gently, in order to keep his distance.

The pursuit, however, did not continue for long.

The carriages halted behind the Von-Dervizov Grammar School for Girls. They were parked wheel to wheel, and one of the drivers gathered all the reins into a bundle, while the other seven men set off towards a two-storey building with a glass display window.

One of them fiddled with the door for a moment, then waved his hand, and the whole group disappeared inside.

Erast Petrovich stuck his head out from round the corner, trying to work out how to creep up on the driver, who was standing on his box, gazing around vigilantly in all directions. All the approaches were brightly lit by the moon.

At this point Masa came panting up. Realising from Fandorin’s expression that his master was about to take decisive action, he threw his false pigtail over his shoulder and whispered angrily in Japanese:

‘I shall only intervene if the supporters of His Majesty are going to kill you. But if you start killing the supporters of His Majesty the Mikado, then do not count on my help.’

‘Oh, drop it,’ Erast Petrovich replied in Russian. ‘Don’t get in my way.’

There was a muffled scream from the house. No further delay was possible.

The engineer ran soundlessly to the nearest lamp-post and hid behind it. He was now only ten paces away from the driver.

Taking a monogrammed cigar case out of his pocket, Fandorin tossed it away from him.

The driver started at the jingling sound and turned his back to the lamppost.

That was exactly what was required. Fandorin covered the distance between them in three bounds, jumped up on to the footboard and pressed the driver’s neck. The driver went limp, and the engineer carefully laid him out on the cobblestones, beside the inflated tyres.

From here he could make out the sign hanging above the door.

‘IOSIF BARANOV. DIAMOND, GOLD AND SILVER ITEMS,’ the engineer read, and muttered:

‘I don’t understand a thing.’

He ran up to the window and glanced in – he could make out the glow of several electric torches in the shop, but it was still dark inside, with only agile shadows darting about. Suddenly the interior was illuminated by an unbearably bright glow, a rain of fiery sparks scattered in all directions, and Fandorin could make out glass counters with men scurrying along them and the door of a safe, with a man leaning over it, holding a blowtorch – the very latest model. Erast Petrovich had seen one like it in a picture in a French magazine.

A man who looked like the nightwatchman had been tied up and was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall: his mouth was covered with sticking plaster, blood was flowing from a wound where he had been hit over the head, and his frantic eyes were glaring wildly at the satanic flame.

‘What has the Japanese secret service c-come to?’ exclaimed Fandorin, turning to his valet, who had just walked up. ‘Can Japan really be so short of money?’

‘The servants of His Majesty the Mikado do not stear,’ replied Masa, surveying the picturesque scene. ‘These are bandits. “Moscow Daredevirs” – I read about them in the newspaper; they make raids in automobiles or fast carriages – they very fond of progress.’ The Japanese servant’s face lit up in a smile. ‘That’s good! Master, I can herp you!’

Erast Petrovich himself had already realised that he was the victim of a misunderstanding – he had mistaken ordinary Warsaw bandits on tour in Moscow for saboteurs. All that time had been wasted for nothing!

But what about the dark-haired man, the passenger from compartment number six, who had fled the scene of the catastrophe in such a suspicious manner?

That’s very simple, the engineer replied to his own question. A daring robbery was committed two days ago in St Petersburg, all the newspapers wrote about it in purple prose. An unidentified individual in a mask stopped the carriage of Countess Vorontsova, robbed Her Excellency, quite literally, of her last thread of clothing and left her there in the road, naked apart from her hat. The spicy part was that the countess had quarrelled with her husband that very evening, and she was moving to her parents’ house, secretly taking all her jewels with her. No wonder Lisitsky said that the inhabitants of the dacha called the dark-haired man ‘a real daredevil’ – he had pulled off the job in St Petersburg and got back here in time for the Moscow operation.

If not for his bitter disappointment and annoyance with himself, Erast Petrovich would probably not have interfered in a mere criminal case, but his fury demanded an outlet – and he felt sorry for the nightwatchman – what if they slit his throat?

‘Take them when they start coming out,’ he whispered to his servant. ‘One for you, one for me.’

Masa nodded and licked his lips.

But fate decreed otherwise.

‘Nix it, gents!’ someone shouted desperately – he must have seen the two shadows outside the window.

In an instant the acetylene glow went out and instead of it a crimson-red gunshot came crashing out of the pitch darkness.

Fandorin and his Japanese valet jumped in opposite directions with perfect synchronisation. The shop window shattered with a deafening jangle.

They carried on firing from the shop, but it was already completely pointless.

‘Whoever jumps out is yours,’ the engineer jabbered rapidly.

He crouched down, rolled agilely over the windowsill covered with shards of glass and dissolved into the dark entrails of the shop.

From inside came the sounds of men yelling and cursing in Russian and Polish, and short, sharp blows. Every so often the room was lit up by the flashes of shots.

A man in a check cap came flying out of the door with his head pulled down into his shoulders. Masa caught the fugitive with an uppercut and laid him out with a blow to the nape of the neck. He rapidly tied him up and dragged him over to the carriages, where the driver Fandorin had half throttled was lying.

Soon another one jumped out through the window and took to his heels without looking back. The Japanese easily overtook him, grabbed him by the wrist and twisted it gently. The bandit squealed and hunched over in pain.

‘Easy, easy,’ Masa coaxed his prisoner as he quickly tied his wrists to his ankles with his belt.

He carried him over to the other two and went back to his original position.

There was no more noise from inside the shop. Masa heard Fandorin’s voice.

‘One, two, three, four… where’s number five? Ah, there he is – five. Masa, how many have you got?’

‘Three.’

‘That tallies.’

Erast Petrovich thrust his head out through the rectangle rimmed with barbs of glass.

‘Run to the depot and bring the gendarmes. And quick about it, or this lot will come round and we’ll be off again.’

The servant ran off in the direction of Novo-Basmannaya Street.

Fandorin untied the watchman and gave him a few slaps on the cheeks to bring him to his senses. But the watchman didn’t want to come to his senses – he muttered and screwed up his eyes, quivered and hiccupped. In medical terms it was called ‘shock’.

While Erast Petrovich was rubbing his temples and feeling for a nerve point just below his collarbone, the stunned bandits began to stir.

One muscly hulk, who had taken an impeccable blow to the chin from a shoe only five minutes earlier, sat up on the floor and started shaking his head. Fandorin had to leave the hiccupping watchman in order to give the reanimated bandit a second helping.

No sooner had that one dived nose first into the floor than another one came round, got up on all fours and started crawling nimbly towards the door. Erast Petrovich dashed after him and stunned him.

A third one was already stirring in the corner, and things were also getting confused out on the street, where Masa had arranged his bandit ikebana: by the light of the street lamp Fandorin could see the driver trying to unfasten the knot on one of his partner’s elbows with his teeth. It occurred to Fandorin that now he was like a clown in a circus who has thrown several balls up in the air and doesn’t know how he’s going to deal with them all. While he’s picking one up off the floor, the others come showering down.

He dashed to the corner. A dark-haired bandit (could it be Yuzek himself?) had not only come round, he had already managed to take out a knife. A quick blow, and another one to make sure. The bandit lay down.

Then a rapid dash to the carriages – before those three could crawl away.

Damn it, where had Masa got to?

But Fandorin’s valet had not managed to reach Lieutenant Colonel Danilov, who was hanging about cluelessly with his men at the Varvarin Company building.

At the very first corner an agile fellow flung himself under Masa’s feet and another two fell on him from above, twisting his arms behind his back.

Masa growled and even tried to bite, but they had his arms twisted tightly, in true professional style.

‘Evstratii Pavlovich! We’ve got one! A Chink! Tell us, Chinky, where’s the shooting?’

They pulled Masa’s pigtail and the wig flew off his head.

‘He’s in disguise!’ the same voice shouted triumphantly. ‘But he’s a slanty-eyed git all right, a Jap! A spy, Evstratii Pavlovich!’

Another man, wearing a bowler hat, walked up and praised his men.

‘Good lads.’

He leaned down to Masa.

‘Good evening to you, Your Japanese Honour. I’m Court Counsellor Mylnikov, Special Section, Department of Police. What’s your name and rank?’

The prisoner tried to give the court counsellor a vicious kick on the shin, but he missed. Then he started hissing and cursing in some foreign tongue.

‘No point in swearing,’ Evstratii Pavlovich rebuked him. ‘You’re caught now, so you can stop chirping. You must be an officer of the Japanese general staff, a nobleman? I’m a nobleman too. So let’s deal honestly with each other. What were you up to here? What’s all this shooting and running about? Give me a light here, Kasatkin.’

The yellow circle of electric light picked out a narrow-eyed face contorted in fury and a head of short-cropped, shiny black hair.

Mylnikov started babbling in confusion:

‘Why, it’s… How do you do, Mr Masa…’

‘Rong time, no see,’ hissed Fandorin’s valet.

The third syllable, in which Rybnikov gets into a jam

In recent months Vasilii Alexandrovich Rybnikov (now Sten) had lived a feverish, nervous life, dealing with hundreds of different matters every day and getting no more than two hours’ sleep a night (which, however, was quite enough for him – he always woke as fresh as a daisy). But the telegram of congratulations he had received the morning after the crash at the Tezoimenitsky Bridge had relieved the former staff captain of routine work, allowing him to concentrate completely on his two main missions or, as he thought of them, ‘projects’.

The brand-new Reuters correspondent did everything that needed to be done at the preliminary stage in the first two days.

In preparation for the main ‘project’ (this involved the onward delivery of a large consignment of certain goods), it was sufficient to send the consignee with the frivolous name of Thrush a letter by the municipal post, telling him to expect delivery in one or two weeks, everything else as formerly agreed.

The second ‘project’, which was of secondary importance, but even so very significant indeed, also required very little fuss or bother. In addition to the aforementioned telegrams to Samara and Krasnoyarsk, Vasilii Alexandrovich ordered from a glass-blowing workshop two slim spirals to match a drawing that he supplied, whispering confidentially to the receiving clerk that they were parts of an alcohol purification device for home use.

By inertia or as a pendant, so to speak, to his hectic life in Peter, Rybnikov spent another day or two running round the military institutions of Moscow, where a correspondent’s calling card ensured him access to all sorts of well-informed individuals – everyone knows how we love the foreign press. The self-styled reporter discovered a great deal of curious and even semi-confidential information, which, when properly assembled and analysed, became completely confidential. After that, however, Rybnikov thought better of it and put an end to all his interviewing. In comparison with the projects that he had been charged to carry out, this was petty business, and there was no point in taking any risks for it.

With an effort of will, Vasilii Alexandrovich suppressed the itch for action that had been developed by long habit and forced himself to spend more time at home. Patience and the need to remain in a state of quiescence are a severe trial for a man who is not used to sitting still for a single minute, but even here Rybnikov proved up to the challenge.

He transformed himself in an instant from an energetic, active individual into a sybarite who sat in his armchair at the window for hours at a stretch and strolled around his apartment in a dressing gown. The new rhythm of his life coincided perfectly with the regimen of the carefree inhabitants of ‘Saint-Saлns’, who woke up at about midday and strolled round the house in curlers and carpet slippers until seven in the evening.

Vasilii Alexandrovich established a wonderful relationship with the girls in no time at all. On the first day the young ladies were still uncertain of the new boarder, and so they made eyes at him, but very soon the rumour spread that he was Beatrice’s sweetheart, and the tentative romantic approaches ceased immediately. On the second day ‘Vasenka’ had already become a general favourite. He treated the girls to sweets and listened to their tittle-tattle with interest and, in addition to that, he tinkled on the piano, crooning sentimental romances in a pleasant, slightly mawkish tenor.

Rybnikov really was interested in spending time with the girls at the boarding house. He had discovered that their tittle-tattle, if correctly directed, could be every bit as useful as dashing from one fake interview to another. Countess Bovada’s boarding house was a substantial establishment, men of position visited it. Sometimes they discussed work matters with each other in the salon and later on, in a separate room, when they were in a tender and affectionate mood, they might let slip something absolutely intriguing. They must have assumed that the empty-headed young ladies would not understand anything anyway. And indeed, the girls were certainly no match for Sophia Kovalevskaya when it came to intellect, but they had retentive memories and they were terribly fond of gossiping.

And so, tea parties at the piano not only helped Vasilii Alexandrovich to kill the time, they also provided a mass of useful information.

Unfortunately, during the initial period of the staff captain’s voluntary life as a hermit, the young ladies’ imagination was totally engrossed by the sensation that had set the entire old capital buzzing. The police had finally caught the famous gang of ‘daredevils’. Everyone in Moscow was writing and talking more about this than about Tsushima. They knew that a special squad of the very finest sleuths had been sent from St Petersburg to capture the audacious bandits – and Muscovites found that flattering.

A redheaded Manon Lescaut who went by the nickname of ‘Wafer’ was known to have been frequented by one of the ‘daredevils’, a handsome Pole and genuine fancy morsel, so now Wafer was wearing black and acting mysteriously. The other girls envied her.

During these days Vasilii Alexandrovich several times caught himself thinking about his companion in the compartment in the train – possibly because Lidina was the total opposite of the sentimental but coarse-spirited inhabitants of the ‘Saint-Saлns’. Rybnikov recalled Glyceria as she made a dash for the emergency brake handle, or with her pale face and bitten lip, binding up a torn artery in a wounded man’s leg with a scrap of her dress.

Surprised at himself, the hermit drove these pictures away; they had nothing to do with his life and his present interests.

For his constitutional he went for a walk along the boulevards, as far as the Cathedral of the Saviour and back again. Vasilii Alexandrovich did not know Moscow very well, and therefore he was terribly surprised when he looked at a sign with the name of a street that led up and away at an angle from the Orthodox cathedral.

The street was called ‘Ostozhenka’.

‘The Bomze building on Ostozhenka Street,’ Vasilii Alexandrovich heard a soft voice say, clipping its consonants in the Petersburg style as clearly as if she were there.

He strolled for a while along the street with its asphalt roadway and lines of beautiful buildings, but soon came to his senses and turned back.

Nonetheless, after that time he got into the habit of making a loop to take in Ostozhenka Street when he reached the end of his horseshoe route on the boulevards. Rybnikov also walked past the Bomze apartment building – a smart four-storey structure. Vasilii Alexandrovich’s indolence had put him in a strange mood, and as he glanced at the narrow Viennese windows, he even allowed himself to daydream a little about what could never possibly happen in a million years.

And then his dreams caught him out.

On the fifth day of his walks, as the false reporter, tapping his cane, was walking down along Ostozhenka Street to Lesnoi Passage, someone called him from a carriage.

‘Vasilii Alexandrovich! Is that you?’

The resounding voice sounded happy.

Rybnikov froze on the spot, mentally cursing his own thoughtlessness. He turned round slowly, putting on a surprised expression.

‘Where did you get to?’ Lidina chirped excitedly. ‘Shame on you, you promised! Why are you in civilian clothes? An excellent jacket, you look much better in it than in that terrible uniform! What about the drawings?’

She asked the last question in a whisper, after she had already jumped down on to the pavement.

Vasilii Alexandrovich warily shook the slim hand in the silk glove. He was nonplussed, which only happened to him very rarely – you might even say that it never happened at all

‘A bad business,’ he mumbled eventually. ‘I am obliged to lie low. That’s why I’m in civvies. And that’s why I didn’t come, too… You know, it’s best to keep well away from me just now.’ To make this more convincing, Rybnikov glanced round over his shoulder and lowered his voice. ‘You go on your way, and I’ll walk on. We shouldn’t attract attention.’

Glyceria Romanovna’s face looked frightened, but she didn’t move from the spot.

She glanced round too, and then spoke right into his ear.

‘A court martial, right? What is it – hard labour? Or… or worse?’

‘Worse,’ he said, moving away slightly. ‘There’s nothing to be done. It’s my own fault. I’m to blame for everything. Really, Glyceria Romanovna, my dear lady, I’ll be going.’

‘Not for anything in the world! How can I abandon you in misfortune? You probably need money, don’t you? I have some. Accommodation? I’ll think of something. Good Lord, what terrible bad luck!’ Tears glinted in the lady’s eyes.

‘No, thank you. I’m living with… with my aunt, my late mother’s sister. I don’t want for anything. See what a dandy I am… really, people are looking at us.’

Lidina took hold of his elbow. ‘You’re right. Get into the carriage, we’ll put the top up.’

And she didn’t wait for him to answer, she put him in – he already knew he could never match the stubbornness of this woman. Remarkably enough, although Vasilii Alexandrovich’s iron will did not exactly weaken at that moment, it was, so to speak, distracted, and his foot stepped up on to the running board of its own accord.

They took a drive round Moscow, talking about all sorts of things. The raised hood of the carriage lent even the most innocent subject an intimacy that Rybnikov found alarming. He decided several times to get out at the next corner, but somehow he didn’t get around to it. Lidina was concerned about one thing above all – how to help this poor fugitive who had the merciless sword of martial law dangling over his head.

When Vasilii Alexandrovich finally took his leave, he had to promise that he would come to Prechistensky Boulevard the next day. Lidina would be riding in her carriage, catch sight of him as though by chance, call him and he would get in again. Nothing suspicious, a perfectly normal street scene.

As he gave his promise, Rybnikov was certain that he would not keep it, but the next day the will of this man of iron was affected once again by the inexplicable phenomenon already mentioned above. At precisely five o’clock the correspondent’s feet brought him to the appointed place and the ride was repeated.

The same thing happened the next day, and the day after that.

There was not even a hint of flirting in their relationship – Rybnikov kept a very strict watch on that. No hints, glances or – God forbid! – sighs. For the most part their conversations were serious, and the tone was not at all the one in which men usually talk to beautiful ladies.

‘I like being with you,’ Lidina confessed one day. ‘You’re not like all the others. You don’t show off, you don’t pay compliments. I can tell that for you I’m not a creature of the female sex, but a person, an individual. I never thought that I could be friends with a man and it could be so enjoyable!’

Something must have changed in the expression on his face, because Glyceria Romanovna blushed and exclaimed guiltily:

‘Ah, what an egotist I am! I’m only thinking about myself! But you’re on the edge of a precipice!’

‘Yes, I am on the edge of a precipice…’ Vasilii Alexandrovich murmured desolately, and the way he said it was so convincing that tears sprang to Lidina’s eyes.

Glyceria Romanovna thought about poor Vasya (that was what she always called him to herself) all the time now – before their meetings and afterwards too. How could she help him? How could she save him? He was disoriented, defenceless, not suited to military service. How stupid to put an officer’s uniform on someone like that! It was enough just to remember what he looked like in that get-up! The war would end soon, and no one would ever remember about those papers, but a good man’s life would be ruined for ever.

Every time she appeared at their meeting elated, with a new plan to save him. She suggested hiring a skilled draughtsman who would make another drawing exactly the same. She thought of appealing for help to a high-ranking general of gendarmes, a good friend of hers, who wouldn’t dare refuse.

Every time, however, Rybnikov turned the conversation on to abstract subjects. He was reluctant and niggardly in speaking about himself. Lidina wanted very much to know where and how he had spent his childhood, but all that Vasilii Alexandrovich told her was that as a little boy he loved to catch dragonflies and let them go later from the top of a high cliff, to watch them darting about in zigzags above the void. He also loved imitating the voices of the birds – and he actually mimicked a cuckoo, a magpie and a blue tit so well that Glyceria Romanovna clapped her hands in delight.

On the fifth day of their drives Rybnikov returned to his apartment in a particularly thoughtful mood. First, because there were fewer than twenty-four hours remaining until both ‘projects’ moved into a crucial stage. And secondly, because he knew he had seen Lidina for the last time that day.

Glyceria Romanovna had been especially endearing today. She had come up with two plans to save Rybnikov: one we have already mentioned, about the general of gendarmes, and a second, which she particularly liked, to arrange for him to escape abroad. She described the advantages of this idea enthusiastically, coming back to it again and again, although he said straight away that it wouldn’t work – they would arrest him at the border post.

The fugitive staff captain strode along the boulevard with his jaw thrust out determinedly, so deep in thought that he didn’t glance at his mirror-bright watch at all.

Once he had reached the boarding house, though, and was inside his separate apartment, his habitual caution prompted him to peep out from behind the curtains.

He gritted his teeth: standing at the opposite pavement was a horse cab with its hood up, despite the bright weather. The driver was staring hard at the windows of the ‘Saint-Saлns’; the passenger could not be seen.

Scraps of thoughts started flitting rapidly through Rybnikov’s head.

How?

Why?

Countess Bovada?

Impossible.

But no one else knows.

The old contacts had been broken off, new ones had not yet been struck up.

There could only be one explanation: that damned Reuters Agency. One of the generals he had interviewed had decided to correct something or add something, phoned the Reuters Moscow office and discovered there was no Sten assigned there. He had taken fright, informed the Okhrana… But even if that was it – how had they found him?

And here again there was only one probable answer: by chance.

Some particularly lucky agent had recognised him in the street from a verbal description (ah, he should at least have changed his wardrobe!), and now was trailing him.

But if it was a chance occurrence, things could be set right, Vasilii told himself, and immediately felt calmer.

He estimated the distance to the carriage: sixteen – no, seventeen – steps.

His thoughts grew even shorter, even more rapid.

Start with the passenger, he’s a professional… A heart attack… I live here, help me carry him in, old mate… Beatrice would be annoyed. Never mind, she was in this up to her neck. What about the cab? In the evening, that could be done in the evening.

He finished thinking it all out on the move. He walked unhurriedly out on to the steps, yawned and stretched. His hand casually flourished a long cigarette holder – empty, with no papirosa in it. Rybnikov also extracted a small, flat pillbox from his pocket and took out of it something that he put in his mouth.

As he walked past the cabby, he noticed the man squinting sideways at him.

Vasilii Alexandrovich paid no attention to the driver. He gripped the cigarette holder in his teeth, quickly jerked back the flap of the cab – and froze.

Lidina was sitting in the carriage.

Suddenly deathly pale, Rybnikov jerked the cigarette holder out of his mouth, coughed and spat into his handkerchief.

Not looking even slightly embarrassed, she said with a cunning smile:

‘So this is where you live, Mr Conspirator! Your auntie has a lovely house.’

‘You followed me?’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, forcing out the words with a struggle, thinking: One more second, a split second, and…

‘Cunning, isn’t it?’ Glyceria Romanovna laughed. ‘I switched cabs, ordered the driver to drive at walking pace, at a distance. I said you were my husband and I suspected you of being unfaithful.’

‘But… what for?’

She turned serious.

‘You gave me such a look when I said “until tomorrow”… I suddenly felt that you wouldn’t come tomorrow. And you wouldn’t come again at all. And I don’t even know where to look for you… I can see that our meetings are a burden on your conscience. You think you’re putting me in danger. Do you know what I’ve thought of?’ Lidina exclaimed brightly. ‘Introduce me to your aunt. She’s your relative, I’m your friend. You have no idea of the power of two women who join forces!’

‘No!’ said Rybnikov, staggering back. ‘Absolutely not!’

‘Then I shall go in myself,’ Lidina declared, and her face took on the same expression it had worn in the corridor of the train.

‘All right, if you want to so badly… But I have to warn my aunt. She has a bad heart, and she’s not very fond of surprises in general,’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, spouting nonsense in his panic. ‘My aunt runs a boarding house for girls from noble families. It has certain rules. Let’s do it tomorrow… Yes, yes, tomorrow. In the early eve-’

‘Ten minutes,’ she snapped. ‘I’ll wait ten minutes, then I’ll go in myself.’

And she emphatically raised the small diamond watch hanging round her neck.

Countess Bovada was an exceptionally resourceful individual, Rybnikov already knew that. She understood his meaning from a mere hint, didn’t waste a single second on questions and went into action immediately.

Probably no other woman would have been capable of transforming a bordello into a boarding house for daughters of the nobility in ten minutes.

After exactly ten minutes (Rybnikov was watching from behind the curtains) Glyceria Romanovna paid her cabby and got out of the carriage with a determined air.

The door was opened for her by the respectable-looking porter, who bowed and led her along the corridor towards the sound of a pianoforte.

Lidina was pleasantly surprised by the rich decor of the boarding house. She thought it rather strange that there were nails protruding from the walls in places – as if pictures had been hanging there, but they had been taken down. They must have been taken away to be dusted, she thought absentmindedly, feeling rather flustered before her important conversation.

In the cosy salon two pretty girls in grammar school uniform were playing the ‘Dog’s Waltz’ for four hands.

They got up, performed a clumsy curtsy and chorused: ‘Bonjour, madame.’

Glyceria Romanovna smiled affectionately at their embarrassment. She had once been a shy young thing just like them, she had grown up in the artificial world of the Smolny Institute: childish young dreams, reading Flaubert in secret, virginal confessions in the quiet of the dormitory…

Vasya was standing there, by the piano – with a bashful look on his plain but sweet face.

‘My auntie’s waiting for you. I’ll show you the way,’ he muttered, letting Lidina go on ahead.

Fira Ryabchik (specialisation ‘grammar school girl’) held Rybnikov back for a moment by the hem of his jacket.

‘Vas, is that your ever-loving? An interesting little lady. Don’t get in a funk. It’ll go all right. We’ve locked the others in their rooms.’

Thank God that she and Lionelka didn’t have any make-up on yet because it was still daytime.

And there was Beatrice, already floating out of the doors to meet them like the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna.

‘Countess Bovada,’ she said, introducing herself with a polite smile. ‘Vasya has told me so much about you!’

‘Countess?’ Lidina gasped.

‘Yes, my late husband was a Spanish grandee,’ Beatrice explained modestly. ‘Please do come into the study.’

Before she followed her hostess, Glyceria Romanovna whispered:

‘So you have Spanish grandees among your kin? Anyone else would certainly have boasted about that. You are definitely unusual.’

In the study things were easier. The countess maintained a confident bearing and held the initiative firmly in her own grip.

She warmly approved of the idea of an escape abroad. She said she would obtain documents for her nephew, entirely reliable ones. Then the two ladies’ conversation took a geographical turn as they considered where to evacuate their adored ‘Vasya’. In the process it emerged that the Spanish grandee’s widow had travelled almost all over the world. She spoke with special affection of Port Said and San Francisco.

Rybnikov took no part in the conversation, merely cracked his knuckles nervously.

Never mind, he thought to himself. It’s the twenty-fifth tomorrow, and after that it won’t matter.

The fourth syllable, in which Fandorin feels afraid

Sombre fury would be the best name to give the mood in which Erast Petrovich found himself. In his long life he had known both the sweetness of victory and the bitterness of defeat, but he could not remember ever feeling so stupid before. This must be the way a whaler felt when, instead of impaling a sperm whale, his harpoon merely scattered a shoal of little fish.

But how could he possibly have doubted that the thrice-cursed dark-haired man was the Japanese agent responsible for the sabotage? The absurd concatenation of circumstances was to blame, but that was poor comfort to the engineer.

Precious time had been wasted, the trail was irredeemably lost.

The mayor of Moscow and the detective police wished to express their heartfelt gratitude to Fandorin for catching the brazen band of crooks, but Erast Petrovich withdrew into the shadows, and all the glory went to Mylnikov and his agents, who had merely delivered the bound bandits to the nearest police station.

There was a clearing of the air between the engineer and the court counsellor, and Mylnikov did not even attempt to be cunning. Gazing at Fandorin with eyes bleached colourless by his disappointment in humankind, Mylnikov admitted without the slightest trace of embarrassment that he had set his agents on the case and come to Moscow himself because he knew from the old days that Fandorin had a uniquely keen nose, and it was a surer way of picking up the trail than wearing out his own shoe leather. He might not have picked up any saboteurs, but he hadn’t come off too badly – the hold-up artists from Warsaw would earn him the gratitude of his superiors and a gratuity.

‘And instead of name-calling, you’d be better off deciding what’s the best way for you and me to rub along,’ Mylnikov concluded amicably. ‘What can you do without me? That railway outfit of yours doesn’t even have the right to conduct an investigation. But I do, and then again, I’ve brought along the finest sleuths in Peter, grand lads, every last one of them. Come on, Fandorin, let’s come to friendly terms, comradely like. The head will be yours, the arms and legs will be ours.’

The proposal made by this rather less than honourable gentleman was certainly not devoid of merit.

‘On a friendly basis, so be it. Only bear in mind, Mylnikov,’ Fandorin warned him, ‘if you take it into your head to be cunning and act behind my b-back, I shan’t beat about the bush. I shan’t write a complaint to your superiors, I’ll simply press the secret bakayaro point on your stomach, and that will be the end of you. And no one will ever guess.’

There was no such thing as a bakayaro point, but Mylnikov, knowing how skilled Fandorin was in all sorts of Japanese tricks, turned pale.

‘Don’t frighten me, my health’s already ruined as it is. Why should I get cunning with you? We’re on the same side. I’m of the opinion that without your Japanese devilry, we’ll never catch the fiend who blew up that bridge. We have to fight fire with fire, sorcery with sorcery.’

Fandorin raised one eyebrow slightly, wondering whether the other man could be playing the fool, but the court counsellor had a very serious air, and little sparks had lit up in his eyes.

‘Do you really think old Mylnikov has no brains and no heart? That I don’t see anything or ponder what’s going on?’ Mylnikov glanced round and lowered his voice. ‘Who is our sovereign, eh? The Lord’s anointed, right? So the Lord should protect him from the godless Japanese, right? But what’s happening? The Christ-loving army’s taking a right battering, left, right and centre. And who’s battering it? A tiny little nation with no strength at all. That’s because Satan stands behind the Japanese, he’s the one who’s giving the yellow bastards their strength. And the Supreme Arbiter of fate has forsaken our sovereign, He doesn’t want to help. Just recently I read a secret report in the Police Department, from the Arkhangelsk province. There’s a holy man prophesying up there, an Old Believer: he says the Romanovs were given three hundred years to rule and no longer, that’s the limit they were set. And those three hundred years are running out. And the whole of Russia is bearing the punishment for that. Doesn’t that sound like the truth?’

The engineer had had enough of listening to this drivel. He frowned and said:

‘Stop all this street sleuth’s drivel. If I want to discuss the fate of the tsarist dynasty, I won’t choose to do it with a member of the Special Section. Are you going to work or just arrange stupid provocations?’

‘Work, work,’ said Mylnikov, dissolving in spasms of wooden laughter, but the sparks were still dancing in his eyes.

Meanwhile the experts had concluded their examination of the site of the disaster and presented a report that completely confirmed Fandorin’s version of events.

The explosion of moderate force that had caused the collapse was produced by a charge of melinite weighing twelve to fourteen pounds – that is, its power was approximately equal to a six-inch artillery shell. Any other bridge on the Nicholas line would probably have survived a shock of that power, but not the decrepit Tezoimenitsky, especially while a heavy train was crossing it. The saboteurs had chosen the spot and the moment with professional competence.

An answer had also been found to the riddle of how the perpetrators had managed to place a mine on a tightly guarded target and explode it right under the wheels of the military train. At the point of the fracture, the experts had discovered scraps of leather from some unknown source and microscopic particles of dense laboratory glass. After racking their brains for a while, they offered their conclusion: a long, cylindrical leather case and a narrow spiral glass tube.

That was enough for Erast Petrovich to reconstruct a picture of what had happened.

The melinite charge had been placed in a leather package, something like a case for a clarinet or other narrow-bodied wind instrument. There had not been any hard casing at all – it would only have made the mine heavier and weakened the blast. The explosive used was chemical, with a retardant – the engineer had read about those. A glass tube holding fulminate of mercury is pierced by a needle, but the fulminate does not flow out immediately, it takes thirty seconds or a minute, depending on the length and shape of the tube.

No doubt remained: the bomb had been dropped from the express travelling directly in front of the special.

The situation by which the two trains were in dangerously close proximity to each other had been arranged by artifice, using the false telegram that was passed on by the telegraph clerk at Kolpino (who, naturally, had disappeared without a trace).

Fandorin racked his brains for a while over the question of exactly how the mine had been dropped. Through the window of a compartment? Hardly. The risk was too great that when the case hit the covering of the bridge, it would go flying off into the river. Then he guessed – through the flush aperture in the toilet. That was what the narrow case was for. Ah, if only that witness hadn’t interfered, with her comments about the suspicious dark-haired man! He should have acted as he had planned to do from the start: make a list of the passengers, and question them too. Even if he’d had to let them all go, he could have interrogated them again now – they would definitely have remembered a travelling musician, and it was quite probable that he wasn’t alone, but in a group…

Once the mystery of the disaster had been solved, Erast Petrovich had no time for wounded pride, for more compelling concerns came to light.

The engineer’s work in the Railway Gendarmerie (or, as Mylnikov called it, the ‘Randarmerie’) had already been going on for an entire year already, directed to a single goal: to protect the most vulnerable section in the anatomy of the ailing Russian dinosaur – its one major artery. The enterprising Japanese predator that had been attacking the wounded giant from all sides must realise sooner or later that he did not need to knock his opponent off its feet, it was enough simply to gnaw through the single major vessel of its blood supply – the Trans-Siberian main line. Left without ammunition, provisions and reinforcements, the Manchurian army would be doomed.

The Tezoimenitsky Bridge was no more than a test run. Traffic over it would be completely restored in two weeks, and meanwhile trains were making a detour via the Pskov-Starorusskoe branch, losing only a few hours. But if a similar blow were to be struck at any point beyond Samara, from where the main line extended as a single thread for eight thousand versts, it would bring traffic to a halt for at least a month. Linevich’s army would be left in a catastrophic position. And apart from that, what was to stop the Japanese from arranging one act of sabotage after another?

Of course, the Trans-Siberian was a new line, built using modern technology. And the last year had not been wasted – a decent system of security was up and running, and the Siberian bridges could in no way be compared with the Tezoimenitsky – you wouldn’t blow them up with ten pounds of melinite dumped through the outlet of a water closet. But the Japanese were shrewd, they would come up with something else. The worst thing had already happened – they had already launched their war on the railways. Just wait and see what would come next.

This thought (which was, unfortunately, quite incontrovertible) made Erast Petrovich feel afraid. But the engineer belonged to that breed of people in whom the response to fear is not paralysis or panic-stricken commotion, but the mobilisation of all their mental resources.

‘Melinite, melinite,’ Fandorin repeated thoughtfully as he strode around the office that he had taken on temporary loan from Danilov. He snapped the fingers of the hand he was holding behind his back, puffed on his cigar and stood at the window for a long time, screwing his eyes up against the bright May sky.

There could be no doubt that the Japanese would also use melinite for subsequent acts of sabotage. They had tested the explosive on the Tezoimenitsky Bridge and the results had been satisfactory.

Melinite was not produced in Russia, the explosive was deployed only in the arsenals of France and Japan, and the Japanese called it simose or, as distorted by the Russian newspapers, ‘shimoza’. It was simose that was given most of the credit for the victory of the Japanese fleet at Tsushima: shells packed with melinite had demonstrated far greater penetrative and explosive power than the Russian powder shells.

Melinite, or picric acid, was ideally suited for sabotage work: powerful, easy to combine with detonators of various kinds and also compact. But even so, to sabotage a large modern bridge would require a charge weighing several poods. Where would the saboteurs get such a large amount of explosive and how would they convey it?

This was the key point – Erast Petrovich realised that straight away – but before he advanced along his primary line of search, he put certain precautions in place on his secondary one.

In case the melinite theory was mistaken and the enemy was intending to use ordinary dynamite or gun cotton, Fandorin gave instructions for a secret circular to be sent to all the military depots and arsenals, warning them of the danger. Of course, this piece of paper would not make the guards any more vigilant, but thieving quartermasters would be more afraid of selling explosive on the side, and that was precisely the way that such lethal materials usually found their way into the hands of Russia’s terrorist bombers.

Having taken this safety measure, Erast Petrovich concentrated on the routes for transporting melinite.

They would deliver it from abroad, and most likely from France (they couldn’t bring it all the way from Japan!).

You can’t ship a load of at least several poods in a suitcase, thought Fandorin, twirling in his fingers a test tube of light yellow powder that he had acquired from an artillery laboratory. He raised it to his face and absentmindedly drew the sharp smell in through his nose – the same ‘fatal aroma of shimoza’ that the Russian war correspondents were so fond of mentioning.

‘Well now, p-perhaps,’ Erast Petrovich murmured.

He quickly got up, ordered his carriage to be brought round, and a quarter of an hour later he was already on Maly Gnezdnikovsky Lane, at the Police Telegraph Office. There he dictated a telegram that set the operator, who had seen all sorts of things in his time, blinking rapidly.

The fifth syllable, consisting almost completely of face-to-face conversations

On the morning of 25 May, Countess Bovada’s boarder received news of the arrival of the Delivery and the Shipment on the same day, as had been planned. The organisation was working with the precision of a chronometer.

The Delivery consisted of four one-and-a-half-pood sacks of maize flour, sent from Lyons for the Moscow bakery ‘Werner and Pfleiderer’. The consignment was awaiting the consignee at the Moscow Freight Station depot on the Brest line. It was all very simple: turn up, show the receipt and sign. The sacks were extremely durable – jute, waterproof. If an overly meticulous gendarme or railway thief poked a hole in one to try it, the yellow, coarse-grained powder that poured out would pass very well for maize flour in wheat-and-rye-eating Russia.

Things were a little more complicated with the Shipment. The sealed wagon was due to arrive by way of a roundabout route from Naples to Batumi, and from there by railway via Rostov to the Rogozhsk shunting yard. According to the documents, it belonged to the Office of Security Escorts and was accompanied by a guard consisting of a corporal and two privates. The guard was genuine, the documents were fake. That is, the crates really did contain, as the transport documents stated, 8,500 Italian ‘Vetterli’ rifles, 1,500 Belgian ‘Francotte’ revolvers, a million cartridges and blasting cartridges. However, this entire arsenal was not intended for the needs of the Escorts Office, but for a man who went by the alias of Thrush. According to the plan developed by Vasilii Alexandrovich’s father, large-scale disturbances were supposed to break out in Moscow, putting a rapid end to the Russian tsar’s enthusiasm for the Manchurian steppes and Korean concessions.

The wise author of the plan had taken everything into account: the fact that the Guards were in St Petersburg, while the old capital had only a scrappy ragbag garrison made up of second-class reservists, and that Moscow was the transport heart of the country, and that the city had 200,000 hungry workers embittered by privation. Ten thousand reckless madcaps could surely be found among them, if only there were weapons. A single spark, and the workers’ quarters would be bristling with barricades.

Rybnikov began as he had been taught in his childhood – that is, with the hardest thing.

The staff captain arrived at the shunting yard. He introduced himself and was given an escort of a minor bureaucrat from the goods arrival section, and they set off to line number three to meet the Rostov special. The clerk felt timid in the company of the gloomy officer, who tapped impatiently on the planking with the scabbard of his sabre. Fortunately, they did not have to wait long – the train arrived exactly on the dot.

The commander of the guard, a corporal who was well past the prime of youth, moved his lips as he read the document presented to him by the staff captain, while the draymen whom Rybnikov had hired drove up to the platform one by one.

But then there was a hitch – there was absolutely no sign of the half-platoon that was supposed to guard the convoy.

Cursing the Russian muddle, the staff captain ran to the telephone. He came back white-faced with fury and let loose a string of such intricately obscene curses that the clerk shrank in embarrassment and the sentries wagged their heads respectfully. There obviously wasn’t going to be any half-platoon for the staff captain.

Having raged for the appropriate length of time, Rybnikov took hold of the corporal by the sleeve.

‘Look, mate, what’s your name… Yekimov, as you can see, this is one almighty cock-up. Help me out here, will you? I know you’ve done your duty and you’re not obliged, but I can’t send it off without a guard, and I can’t leave it here either. I’ll see you all right: three roubles for you and one each for your fine lads here.’

The corporal went to have a word with the privates, who were as long in the tooth and battered by life as he was.

The deal they struck was this: in addition to the money, His Honour would give them a paper saying the squad could spend two days on the town in Moscow. Rybnikov promised.

They loaded up and drove off. The staff captain at the front in a cab, then the drays with the crates, the sentries on foot, one on the left, one on the right, the corporal bringing up the rear of the procession. Pleased with the remuneration and leave pass they had been promised, the privates strode along cheerfully, holding their Mosin rifles at the ready. Rybnikov had warned them to keep their eyes skinned – the slanty-eyed enemy never slept.

Rybnikov had booked a warehouse on the River Moscow in advance. The draymen carried the Shipment in, took their money and left.

The staff captain carefully put the receipt from a member of the workmen’s co-operative away in his pocket as he walked over to the sentries from Rostov.

‘Thanks for the help, lads. I’ll settle up now, a bargain’s a bargain.’

The riverside wharf in front of the warehouse was deserted, and the river water, iridescent from patches of oil, splashed under the planking.

‘But Your Honour, where are the guards?’ Yekimov asked, gazing around. ‘It’s kind of odd. An arms depot with no guards.’

Instead of answering, Rybnikov jabbed him in the throat with a finger of steel, then turned towards the privates. One of them was just about to lend the other some tobacco – and he froze like that, with his mouth hanging open, so the crude shag missed the paper and went showering past. Vasilii Alexandrovich hit the first one with his right hand and the second with his left. It all happened very quickly: the corporal’s body was still falling, and his two subordinates were already dead.

Rybnikov dropped the bodies under the wharf, after first tying a heavy rock to each one of them.

He took off his cap and wiped the sweat off his forehead.

Right, then, it was only half past ten and the most troublesome part of the job was already over.

It only took ten minutes to collect the Delivery. Vasilii Alexandrovich arrived at the Moscow Freight Station in tarred boots, a long coat and a cloth cap – a regular shop counterman. He carried the sacks out himself, wouldn’t even let the cabby help, in case he might ask for an extra ten kopecks. Then he transported the ‘maize flour’ from the Brest line to the Ryazan-Uralsk line, because the Delivery’s onward route led towards the east. On the way across to the other side of the city, he repacked the goods and at the station he checked it in as two lots, with different receipts.

And that put an end to his scurrying about from one railway station to another. Rybnikov wasn’t in the least bit tired; on the contrary, he was filled with a fierce, vigorous energy – he had grown weary of idleness and, of course, he was inspired by the importance of his actions.

Expertly dispatched, received on time, competently delivered, he thought. That was the way invincibility was shaped. When everyone acted in his own place as if the outcome of the entire war depended on him alone.

He was slightly concerned about the ‘dummies’ summoned from Samara and Krasnoyarsk. What if they were late? But it was no accident that Rybnikov had chosen those precise two out of the notebook filled with snaky squiggles. The Krasnoyarsk man (Vasilii Alexandrovich thought of him as ‘Tunnel’) was greedy, and his greed made him dependable, and the Samara man (his code name was ‘Bridge’) might not be outstandingly dependable, but he had compelling reasons not to be late – he was a man with not much time left.

And his calculations had proved correct; neither of the ‘dummies’ had let him down. Rybnikov was already aware of this when he left the station for the agreed hotels – the ‘Kazan’ and the ‘Railway’. The hotels were located close to each other, but not actually adjacent. The last thing he needed was for the two dummies to get to know each other through some grotesque coincidence.

At the Railway Hotel, Vasilii Alexandrovich left a note: ‘At three. Goncharov’. The note at the Kazan Hotel read: ‘At four: Goncharov’.

Now it was time to deal with the man with the alias of Thrush, the consignee of the Shipment.

In this matter Rybnikov employed particular caution, for he knew that the Social Revolutionaries were kept under close surveillance by the Okhrana, and the revolutionary riff-raff had plenty of traitors among their own ranks. He could only hope that Thrush realised this as well as he, Rybnikov, did.

Vasilii Alexandrovich made a call from a public telephone (a most convenient innovation that had only recently appeared in the old capital). He asked the lady to give him number 34-81.

He spoke the prearranged words:

‘A hundred thousand pardons. May I ask for the honourable Ivan Konstantinovich to come to the phone?’

After a second’s pause, a woman’s voice replied:

‘He’s not here at present, but he will be soon.’

That meant Thrush was in Moscow and prepared to meet.

‘Please be so good as to let Ivan Konstantinovich know that Professor Stepanov wishes to invite him to his seventy-third birthday.’

‘Professor Stepanov?’ the woman asked, bemused. ‘To his seventy-third?’

‘Yes, that is correct.’

The go-between didn’t need to understand the meaning, her job was to pass on precisely what he said. In the figure 73, the first numeral indicated the time, and the second was a position in a list of previously agreed meeting places. Thrush would understand: at seven o’clock, at place number 3.

If anybody had eavesdropped on Rybnikov’s conversation with the man from Krasnoyarsk, he probably would not have understood a thing.

‘More account books?’ asked Tunnel, a sturdy man with a moustache and eyes that were constantly half closed. ‘We should raise the price. Everything’s so expensive nowadays.’

‘No, not books,’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, standing in the middle of the cheap hotel room and listening carefully to the footsteps in the corridor. ‘A special delivery. Payment too. Fifteen hundred.’

‘How much?’ the other man gasped.

Rybnikov pulled out a bundle of banknotes.

‘There. You’ll receive the same again in Khabarovsk. If you do everything right.’

‘Three thousand?’

The Krasnoyarsk man’s eyebrows twitched and twitched again, but they didn’t rise up on to his forehead. It’s not easy to gape in astonishment with eyes used to watching the world through a peephole.

The man whom Vasilii Alexandrovich had christened Tunnel had no idea about this nickname, or about the real activities of the people who paid for his services so generously. He was convinced that he was assisting illegal gold miners. The ‘Statute on Private Gold-Mining’ required prospecting cooperatives to hand over their entire output to the state in exchange for so-called ‘assignations’ at a price lower than the market level and with all sorts of other deductions into the bargain. And everybody knew that when the law was unjust or irrational, people found ways to get round it.

Tunnel occupied a post that was extremely useful to the Organisation – he escorted the postal wagons along the Trans-Siberian main line. When he carried notebooks filled with columns of figures from the European part of the empire to the Far East and back, he assumed that this was financial correspondence between the miners and the dealers in black-market gold.

But Rybnikov had fished the postman out of his own cunning little notebook for a different purpose.

‘Yes, three thousand,’ he said firmly. ‘And no one pays money like that for nothing, you know that.’

‘What do I have to carry?’ asked Tunnel, licking his lips, which had turned dry with excitement.

Rybnikov snapped:

‘Explosive. Three poods.’

The postman started blinking, thinking it over. Then he nodded.

‘For the diggings? To smash the rocks?’

‘Yes. Wrap the crates in sackcloth, like packages. Do you know tunnel No. Twelve on the Baikal Bypass Line?’

‘The “Half-Tunnel”? Everyone knows that.’

‘Throw the crates off exactly halfway through, at marker 197. Our man will pick them up afterwards.’

‘But… er, won’t it go off bang?’

Rybnikov laughed.

‘It’s obvious you know nothing about using explosives. Haven’t you ever heard of detonators? Go off bang – don’t talk nonsense.’

Satisfied with this reply, Tunnel spat on his fingers, preparing to count the money, and Vasilii Alexandrovich smiled to himself: It won’t go off bang, it will make a boom that sets the Winter Palace shaking. Then just let them try to rake out the smashed rock and drag out the flattened wagons and locomotive.

The Baikal Bypass Tunnel, which had been built at huge expense and opened only recently, ahead of schedule, was the final link in the Trans-Siberian. The military trains used to line up in immense queues at the Lake Baikal ferry crossing, but now the line pulsated three times faster than before. The Half-Tunnel was the longest one on the line; if it was put out of action, the Manchurian army would be back on short rations again.

And that was only half of Rybnikov’s dual ‘project’.

The second half was to be implemented by the man staying at the Kazan Hotel, with whom Vasilii Alexandrovich spoke quite differently – not curtly and abruptly, but soulfully, with compassionate restraint.

He was a man still quite young, with a sallow complexion and protruding Adam’s apple. He made a strange impression: the subtle facial features, nervous gesticulations and spectacles fitted uncomfortably with the worn pea jacket, calico shirt and rough boots.

The man from Samara coughed up blood and was in love, but his feelings were not requited. This made him hate the whole world, especially the world close to him: the people around him, his native city, his own country. There was no need for secrecy with him – Bridge knew who he was working for and he carried out his assignments with lascivious vengefulness.

Six months earlier, on the instructions of the Organisation, he had left university and taken a job as a driver’s mate on the railway. The heat of the firebox was consuming the final remnants of his lungs, but Bridge was not clinging to life, he wanted to die as soon as possible.

‘You told our man that you wish to go out with a bang. I’ll give you the opportunity to do that,’ Rybnikov declared in ringing tones. ‘This bang will be heard right across Russia, right round the world, in fact.’

‘Tell me, tell me,’ the consumptive said eagerly.

‘The Alexander Bridge in Syzran…’ said Rybnikov, and paused for effect. ‘The longest in Europe, seven hundred sazhens. If it is sent crashing into the Volga, the main line will come to a halt. Do you understand what that means?’

The man he called Bridge smiled slowly.

‘Yes, yes. Collapse, defeat, disgrace. Surrender. You Japanese know where to strike! You deserve the victory!’ The former student’s eyes blazed brightly and he spoke faster and faster with every word. ‘It can be done! I can do it! Do you have powerful explosive? I’ll hide it in the tender, under the coal. I take one slab into the cabin. I throw it in the firebox, it explodes, fireworks!’

He burst into laughter.

‘On the seventh span,’ Rybnikov put in gently. ‘That’s very important. Otherwise it might not work. On the seventh, don’t get that wrong.’

‘I won’t! I go on duty the day after tomorrow. A goods train to Chelyabinsk. The driver will get what’s coming to him, the bastard, he’s always sneering at my cough, calls me “Tapeworm”. I feel sorry for the stoker, though, he’s only a young boy. But I’ll get him off. At the last station I’ll catch his hand with the shovel. Tell him never mind, I’ll shovel the coal myself. But what about our deal?’ Bridge exclaimed with a sudden shudder. ‘You haven’t forgotten about our deal?’

‘How could we?’ asked Rybnikov, setting his hand to his heart. ‘We remember. Ten thousand. We’ll hand it over exactly as you instructed.’

‘Not hand it over, drop it off,’ the sick man cried out nervously. ‘And the note: “In memory of what might have been”. I’ll write it myself, you’ll get it wrong.’

And he wrote it there and then, splattering ink about.

‘She’ll understand… And if she doesn’t, so much the better,’ he muttered with a sniff. ‘Here, take it.’

‘But bear in mind that the individual who is so precious to you will only receive the money and the note on one condition – if the bridge collapses. Don’t get the count wrong, the seventh span.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said the man from Samara, shaking a tear from his eyelashes. ‘If there’s one thing consumption has taught me, it’s precision – I have to take my pills at the right time. But don’t you trick me. Give me your word of honour as a samurai.’

Vasilii Alexandrovich drew himself up to attention, wrinkled up his forehead and narrowed his eyes. Then he performed a fanciful gesture that he had just invented and solemnly declared:

‘My word of honour as a samurai.’

The most important face-to-face conversation was set for seven o’clock in the evening, in a cab drivers’ inn close to the Kaluga Gates (place number three).

The place had been well chosen: dark, dirty, noisy, but not uproarious. In this place they didn’t drink beverages that heated the brain, but tea, in large amounts, entire samovars of it. The clientele was well mannered and incurious – they’d seen quite enough of the hustle and bustle of the streets, and of their own passengers, during the day. Now all they wanted was to sit in peace and quiet and make staid conversation.

Vasilii Alexandrovich arrived ten minutes late and immediately made for the table in the corner, which was occupied by a sturdy man with a beard, an expressionless face and a piercing gaze that was never still for a moment.

Rybnikov had been watching the entrance to the inn for the last hour from the next gateway and had spotted Thrush as he walked up. When he was certain Thrush wasn’t being trailed, he went in.

‘My greetings to Kuzmich,’ he shouted from a distance, holding up one hand with the fingers spread wide. Thrush didn’t know what he looked like, and they had to act out a meeting between old friends.

The revolutionary was not in the least surprised, and he replied in the same tone:

‘Aha, Mustapha. Sit down, you old Tartar dog, we’ll have a spot of tea.’

He squeezed Rybnikov’s hand tightly and slapped him on the shoulder for good measure.

They sat down.

At the next table a large party was sedately consuming tea with hard bread rings. They glanced incuriously at the two friends and turned away again.

‘Are they following you?’ Vasilii Alexandrovich said quietly, asking the most important question first. ‘Are you sure there’s no police agent in your group?’

‘Certainly they’re following me, quite definitely. And we have a stooge. We’re leaving him alone for the time being. Better to know who – they’ll only plant another one, and then try to figure out who it is.’

‘They are following you?’ Rybnikov tautened like a spring and cast a rapid glance in the direction of the counter – there was an exit into a walk-through courtyard behind it.

‘They’re following me, so what?’ the Socialist Revolutionary said with a shrug. ‘Let them follow, when it doesn’t matter. And when it does, I can give them the slip, I’m well used to it. So don’t you get nervous, my bold samurai. I’m clean today.’

It was the second time in one day that Vasilii Alexandrovich had been a called a samurai, but this time the mockery was obvious.

‘You are Japanese, aren’t you?’ the consignee of the Shipment asked, crunching on a lump of sugar and slurping tea noisily from his saucer. ‘I read that some of the samurais are almost indistinguishable from Europeans.’

‘What the hell difference does it make whether I’m a samurai or not?’ Rybnikov asked, out of habit slipping into the tone of the person he was talking to.

‘True enough. Let’s get down to business. Where are the goods?’

‘I took them to a warehouse on the river, as you asked. Why do you need them on the river?’

‘I just do. Where exactly?’

‘I’ll show you later.’

‘Who else knows, apart from you? Unloading, transporting, guarding – that’s quite an operation. Are they reliable people? Know how to keep a still tongue in their heads?’

‘They’ll be as silent as the grave,’ Rybnikov said seriously. ‘I’ll wager my head on that. When will you be ready to collect?’

Thrush scratched his beard.

‘We’re thinking of floating some of the goods, a small part, down the Oka, to Sormovo. A barge will come up from there tomorrow at nightfall. We’ll collect it then.’

‘Sormovo?’ said Vasilii Alexandrovich, narrowing his eyes. ‘That’s good. A good choice. What’s your plan of action?’

‘We’ll start with a strike on the railways. Then a general strike. And when the authorities start getting the jitters, let the Cossacks loose or do a bit of shooting – the combat squads will be out in a flash. Only this time we’ll manage without cobblestones, the weapon of the proletariat.’

‘When are you going to start?’ Rybnikov asked casually. ‘I need it to be within a month.’

The revolutionary’s stony face twisted into an ironic grin.

‘Running out of steam, are you, sons of the Mikado? On your last legs?’

A snigger ran round the room and Vasilii Alexandrovich started in surprise – surely they couldn’t have heard?

He jerked round, and then immediately relaxed.

Two grey-bearded cab drivers had just staggered into the inn, both well oiled. One had missed his footing and fallen, and the other was trying to help him up, muttering:

‘Never mind, Mityukha, a horse has got four legs, and it still stumbles…’

Someone shouted from one of the tables:

‘A horse like that’s ready for the knacker’s yard!’

People cackled with laughter.

Mityukha was about to curse his mockers roundly, but the waiters swooped on him and in half a jiffy they had shoved the two drunken cabbies out: There, don’t you go bringing shame on our establishment.

‘Ah, old Mother Russia,’ Thrush chuckled with another crooked grin. ‘Never mind, soon we’ll give her such a jolt, she’ll jump right out of her pants.’

‘And set off at a run with a bare backside, into the bright future?’

The revolutionary looked intently into the cold eyes of the other man.

I shouldn’t have mocked him, Rybnikov realised immediately. That was going too far.

He held that glance for a few seconds, then pretended that he couldn’t hold out and lowered his eyes.

‘You and we have only one thing in common,’ the SR said contemptuously. ‘A lack of bourgeois sentiment. Only we revolutionaries no longer have any, while you young predators don’t yet have any – you haven’t reached that age yet. You use us, we use you, but you, Mr Samurai, are not my equal. You’re no more than a cog in a machine, and I’m the architect of tomorrow, savvy?’

He is like a cat, Vasilii Alexandrovich decided. Lets you feed him, but he won’t lick your hand – the most he’ll do is purr, and even that’s not very likely.

He had to reply in the same style, but without aggravating the confrontation.

‘All right, Mr Architect, to hell with the fancy words. Let’s discuss the details.’

Thrush even left like a cat, without saying goodbye.

When he had clarified everything he needed to know, he simply got up and darted out through the door behind the counter, leaving Vasilii Alexandrovich to exit via the street.

In front of the inn cabbies were dozing on their coach boxes, waiting for passengers. The first two were the drunks who had been ejected from the inn. The first one was completely out of it, snoring away with his nose down against his knees. The second was more or less holding up, though – he even shook his reins when he caught sight of Rybnikov.

But Vasilii Alexandrovich didn’t take a cab at the inn – that would contravene the rules of conspiracy. He walked quite a long way before he stopped one that happened to be driving past.

At the corner of Krivokolenny Street, at a poorly lit and deserted spot, Rybnikov put a rouble note on the seat, jumped down on to the road – gently, without even making the carriage sway – and ducked into a gateway.

As they say, God takes care of those who take care of themselves.

The sixth syllable, in which a tail and ears play an important part

Special No. 369-B was expected at precisely midnight, and there was no reason to doubt that the train would arrive on the dot – Fandorin was being kept informed of its progress by telegraph from every station. The train was travelling ‘on a green light’, with priority over all others. Freight trains, passenger trains and even expresses had to give way to it. When the locomotive with only a single compartment carriage went hurtling past an ordinary train that had inexplicably come to a halt at the station in Bologoe or Tver, the worldly-wise passengers said to each other: ‘Higher-ups in a hurry. Must be some kind of hitch in Moscow’.

The windows of the mysterious train were not only closed, but completely curtained over. During the entire journey from the present capital to the old one, 369-B stopped only once, to take on coal, and then for no more than fifteen minutes.

They were waiting to meet the mysterious train outside Moscow, at a small way station surrounded by a double cordon of railway gendarmes. A fine, repulsive drizzle was falling, and the lamps were swaying in a gusting wind, sending sinister shadows scuttling furtively across the platform.

Erast Petrovich arrived ten minutes before the appointed time, listened to Lieutenant Colonel Danilov’s report on the precautions that had been taken and nodded.

Court Counsellor Mylnikov, who had been informed of the imminent event only an hour earlier (the engineer had called for him without any forewarning), couldn’t keep still: he ran round the platform several times, always coming back to Fandorin and asking: ‘Who is it we’re waiting for?’

‘You’ll see,’ Fandorin replied briefly, glancing every now and then at his gold Breguet.

At one minute to twelve they heard a long hoot, then the bright lights of the locomotive emerged from the darkness.

The rain started coming down harder, and the valet opened an umbrella over the engineer’s head, deliberately standing so that the drops ran off on to Mylnikov’s hat. However, Mylnikov was so worked up that he didn’t notice – he merely shuddered when a cold rivulet ran in under his collar.

‘The head of your division, is it?’ he asked when he made out the compartment carriage. ‘The chief of the Corps?’ And finally, lowering his voice to a whisper: ‘Not the minister himself, surely?’

‘Exclude all unauthorised individuals!’ Fandorin shouted when he spotted a linesman at the end of the platform.

Gendarmes went dashing off with a loud tramping of boots, to carry out the order.

The 369-B came to a halt. Evstratii Pavlovich Mylnikov thrust out his chest and whipped off his bowler, but when the clanging of iron and screeching of brakes stopped, his ears were assaulted by a strange sound very similar to the diabolical ululations that tormented his ailing nerves at night. Mylnikov gave his head a shake to drive away the dark spell, but the howling only grew louder, and then he quite clearly heard barking.

An officer in a leather pea jacket skipped smartly down the steps, saluted Fandorin and handed him a package bearing a mysterious inscription in black: RSEUDPWUHPHHDAPO.

‘What’s that?’ Mylnikov asked in a faltering voice, suspecting that he was dreaming all this – the engineer’s appearance in the middle of the night, the drive through the rain, the dogs’ barking and the unpronounceable word on the envelope,

Fandorin decoded the abbreviation:

‘The Russian Society for the Encouragement of the Use of Dogs in Police Work under the Honorary Presidency of His Highness Duke Alexander Petrovich of Oldenburg. Very well, L-Lieutenant, you can bring them out. The horseboxes are waiting.’

Police officers started emerging from the carriage one after another, each leading a dog on a leash. There were German shepherds and giant schnauzers and spaniels, and even mongrels.

‘What is all this?’ Mylnikov repeated perplexedly. ‘What’s it for?’

‘This is Operation Fifth Sense.’

‘Fifth? Which one’s the fifth?’

‘Smell.’

Operation Fifth Sense had been planned and prepared with the utmost dispatch in a little over two days.

In the urgent telegram of 18 May that had so greatly astonished the experienced police telegraph clerk, Fandorin had written to his chief: ‘REQUEST URGENTLY GATHER DUKE’S DOGS DETAILS FOLLOW’.

Erast Petrovich was an enthusiastic supporter and even, to some extent, inspirer of the initiative undertaken by the Duke of Oldenburg, whose idea was to establish in Russia a genuine, scientifically organised police dog service on the European model. This was a new area, little studied as yet, but it had immediately been given massive backing.

Coaching a good dog to track down a specific smell required only a few hours. The amount of simose needed was allocated from the Artillery Department and work began: fifty-four police instructors thrust the noses of their shaggy helpers into the yellow powder, the air was filled with reproachful and approving exclamations, peals of barking and the cheerful sound of sugar crunching between dog’s teeth.

Melinite had an acrid smell and the tracker dogs recognised it easily, even among sacks of common chemical products. Following a brief training course, His Highness’s protйgйs set off on their work assignments: twenty-eight dogs went to the western border – two to each of the fourteen crossing points – and the rest went on the special train to Moscow, to receive further instructions from the engineer Fandorin.

Working by day and night in two shifts, the handlers led the dogs through the carriages and depots of all the railway lines of the old capital. Mylnikov did not believe in Fandorin’s plan, but he didn’t try to interfere, just looked on. In any case, the court counsellor had no ideas of his own on how to catch the Japanese agents.

On the fifth day, Erast Petrovich finally received the long-awaited telephone call in the office where he was studying the most vulnerable points of the Trans-Siberian Railway, all marked on a map with little red flags.

‘We’ve got it!’ an excited voice shouted into the receiver over the sound of deafening barking. ‘Mr Engineer, I think we’ve got it! This is trainer Churikov calling from the Moscow Freight Station on the Brest line! We haven’t touched a thing, just as you ordered!’

Erast Petrovich telephoned Mylnikov immediately.

They dashed to the station from different directions, arriving almost simultaneously.

Trainer Churikov introduced his bosses to the heroine of the hour, a Belgian sheepdog of the Grunendal breed:

‘Mignonette.’

Mignonette sniffed at Fandorin’s shoes and wagged her tail. She bared her fangs at Mylnikov.

‘Don’t take offence, she’s in pup,’ the handler said hastily. ‘But it makes the nose keener.’

‘Well, what is it you’ve found?’ the court counsellor demanded impatiently.

Churikov tugged on the dog’s lead and she plodded reluctantly towards the depot, glancing back at the engineer. At the entrance she braced her paws against the ground and even lay down, making it very clear that she was in no hurry to go anywhere. She squinted up at the men to see whether they would scold her.

‘She’s acting up,’ the trainer said, sighing. He squatted down, scratched the bitch’s belly and whispered something in her ear.

Mignonette graciously got up and set off towards the stacks of crates and sacks.

‘There now, there, watch,’ said Churikov, throwing up one hand.

‘Watch what?’

‘The ears and the tail!’

Mignonette’s ears and tail were lowered. She walked slowly along one row, and then another. Halfway along the third, her ears suddenly jerked erect and her tail shot up and then sank back down and stayed there, pressed between her legs. The tracker dog sat down and barked at four neat, medium-sized jute sacks.

The consignment had arrived from France and was intended for the Werner and Pfleiderer Bakery. It had been delivered on the morning train from Novgorod. The contents were a yellow powder that left a distinctive oily sheen on the fingers – no doubt about it, it was melinite.

‘It crossed the border before the dogs got there,’ Fandorin said after checking the accompanying documentation. ‘Right then, Mylnikov, we have work to do.’

They decided to do the work themselves and not trust it to the detectives. Erast Petrovich dressed up as a railwayman and Mylnikov as a loader. They installed themselves in the next goods shed, which gave them an excellent view of the depot and the approaches to it.

The consignee arrived for his delivery at 11.55.

The rather short man, who looked like a shop hand, presented a piece of paper, signed the office book and carried the sacks to a closed wagon himself.

The observers were glued to their binoculars.

‘Japanese, I think,’ Erast Petrovich murmured.

‘Oh, come on!’ Mylnikov exclaimed doubtfully, fiddling with the little focusing wheel. ‘As Russian as they come, with just a touch of the Tatar, the way it ought to be.’

‘Japanese,’ the engineer repeated confidently. ‘Perhaps with an admixture of European blood, but the form of the eyes and the nose… I’ve seen him before somewhere. But where, and when? Perhaps he simply looks like one of my Japanese acquaintances… Japanese faces are not noted for their variety – anthropology distinguishes only twelve basic types. That’s because of their insular isolation. There was no influx of b-blood from other races.’

‘He’s leaving!’ Evstratii Pavlovich exclaimed, interrupting the lecture on anthropology. ‘Quick!’

But there was no need to hurry. A whole fleet of cabs and carriages of various kinds had been assembled to carry out surveillance around the city, and an agent was sitting in every one, so the mark couldn’t get away.

The engineer and the court counsellor lowered themselves on to the springy seat of the carriage bringing up the rear of this cavalcade, which was giving a convincing imitation of a busy stream of traffic, and set off slowly through the streets.

The buildings and lamp-posts were decorated with flags and garlands. Moscow was celebrating the birthday of the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna far more sumptuously than in previous years. There was a special reason for that: the sovereign’s wife had recently presented Russia with an heir to the throne, after four little girls – or ‘blank shots’, as Mylnikov expressed it disrespectfully.

‘But they say the little lad’s sickly, there’s a hex on him,’ Evstratii Pavlovich said, and sighed. ‘The Lord’s punishing the Romanovs.’

This time the engineer didn’t bother to reply and merely frowned at this provocative gibberish.

Meanwhile the mark demonstrated that he was a conjuror. At the freight station he had loaded four sacks into his closed wagon, but at the left luggage office of the Ryazan-Uralsk line he took out three wooden crates and eight small bundles wrapped in shiny black paper. He let the wagon go. Of course, the agents stopped the wagon round the very first bend, but all they found in it were four empty jute sacks. For some reason the melinite had been extracted from them and repacked.

The clerk at the left luggage office stated that the crates and the bundles had been left as two separate items, with different receipts.

But Fandorin received all this information only later. Since the putative Japanese proceeded on his way from the station as a pedestrian, the engineer and the court counsellor took the surveillance into their own hands once again.

They followed the mark at the greatest possible distance and dispatched the sleuths into the reserve. The most important thing now was not to frighten off the live bait that might attract some other fish.

The shop hand called into two hotels close to the station – the ‘Kazan’ and the ‘Railway’. They prudently decided not to go barging in, and they wouldn’t have had time in any case – the mark spent no more than a minute inside each building.

Erast Fandorin was scowling darkly – his worst fears had been confirmed: the Ryazan-Uralsk line was part of the great transcontinental line on which the engineer’s red pencil had marked at least a hundred vulnerable sectors. For which one of them were the items handed in at the left luggage office intended?

From the station square the mark set off into the centre and circled around in the city for quite a long time. On several occasions he suddenly stopped his cabby right there in the middle of a street and let him go, but he failed to shake off the superbly organised surveillance.

Shortly after seven o’clock in the evening, he entered a cab drivers’ inn close to Kaluga Square. Since he had spent the previous hour hiding in the gateway of the next building, he had to have an appointment here, and this was an opportunity that must not be missed.

As soon as the mark entered the inn (that happened at nine minutes past seven), Mylnikov summoned the Flying Brigade’s special carriage with his whistle. This carriage was a highly convenient innovation in modern detective work: it contained a selection of costumes and items of disguise to suit every possible occasion.

The engineer and the court counsellor dressed up as cabbies and staggered unsteadily into the tavern.

After casting an eye round the dark room, Evstratii Pavlovich pretended that he couldn’t stay on his feet and collapsed on the floor. When Fandorin leaned down over him he whispered:

‘That’s Lagin with him. Codename Thrush. An SR. Extremely dangerous. How about that…’

The important point had been established, so rather than loiter in the tavern in open view, they allowed themselves to be thrown out in the street.

After stationing four agents at the back entrance, they hurriedly discussed their alarming discovery.

‘Our agents abroad inform us that Colonel Akashi, the senior Japanese foreign agent, is meeting with political йmigrйs and buying large deliveries of weapons,’ Mylnikov whispered, leaning down from the coach box of his government carriage. ‘But that’s a long way off, in places liked Paris and London, and this is old mother Moscow. We couldn’t have slipped up there, surely? Give the local loudmouths Japanese rifles, and we’ll have real trouble…’

Erast Petrovich listened with his teeth gritted. Provoking a revolution in the enemy’s rear – a dйmarche unheard of in the practice of war in Europe – was a hundred times more dangerous than any bombs on railway lines. It threatened not just the outcome of the military campaign, but the fate of the Russian state as a whole. The warriors of the Land of Yamato knew what real war was: there were no means that were impermissible, there was only defeat or victory. How the Japanese had changed in a quarter of a century!

‘The **** Asian ***s!’ Mylnikov cursed obscenely, as if he had overheard Fandorin’s thoughts. ‘There’s nothing holy! How do you fight bastards like that?’

But was this not what Andrei Bolkonsky was talking about before the Battle of Borodino, the engineer objected – not out loud to Mylnikov, naturally, but to himself. Chivalry and war practised by the rules are stupid nonsense, according to the most attractive character in the whole of Russian literature. Kill prisoners, do not negotiate. No indulging noble sentiments. War is not amusement.

But even so, the side that indulges noble sentiments is the one that will win, Fandorin suddenly thought, but before he could follow this paradoxical idea through to its conclusion, the agent stationed by the door gave the signal, and he had to clamber up on to his coach box at the double.

The shop hand came out alone. He looked at the line of cabs (every last one belonging to the Okhrana), but didn’t take one. He walked away some distance and stopped a passing cabby – another false one, naturally.

But in the end all of Mylnikov’s cunning was wasted. In some incomprehensible manner, the mark disappeared from the carriage. The detective impersonating the driver did not notice when and how this happened: first there was a passenger, and then there wasn’t – just a crumpled rouble note lying on the seat in mockery.

This was annoying, but not fatal.

First, there was still the SR Lagin, alias Thrush – they had a man in his inner circle. And secondly, near the left luggage office, an ambush was set up, for which Fandorin had especially high hopes, since the arrangements were made through the Railway Gendarmerie, without Mylnikov involved.

The clerk was given a thoroughly detailed briefing by the engineer. As soon as the ‘shop hand’ appeared, or anyone else came to present the familiar receipts, he was to press a button that had been installed specially. A lamp would go on in the next room, where a squad was waiting, and the officer in charge would immediately telephone Fandorin, and then, depending on his orders, either make an arrest or continue secret surveillance (through an eyehole) until plainclothes agents arrived. And. of course, the clerk would make sure the luggage was not given out too quickly.

‘Now we’ve got the slanty-eyed macaque like this,’ Mylnikov gloated, grabbing a tight fistful of air in his strong fingers.

The seventh syllable, in which it emerges that not all Russians love Pushkin

A few days before the long-awaited 25 May, the Moscow life of Vasilii Alexandrovich Rybnikov was punctuated by an episode that may appear insignificant in comparison with subsequent events, but not to mention it at all would amount to dishonesty.

It happened during the period when the fugitive staff captain was languishing in the tormenting embrace of idleness, which, as already mentioned above, even led him to commit certain acts rather uncharacteristic of him.

In one of his idle moments, he visited the Address Bureau located on Gnezdnikovsky Lane and started making enquiries about a certain person in whom he was interested.

Rybnikov did not even think of buying a two-kopeck request form; instead he demonstrated his knowledge of psychology by engaging the clerk in soulful conversation, explaining that he was trying to find an old army comrade of his deceased father. He had lost sight of this man a long time ago and understood perfectly well what a difficult task it was, so he was willing to pay for the all the work involved at a special rate.

‘Without a receipt?’ the clerk enquired, raising himself slightly above the counter to make sure that there were no other customers in the premises.

‘Why, naturally. What use would it be to me?’ The expression in the staff captain’s yellowish-brown eyes was imploring and his fingers casually twirled a rather thick-looking wallet. ‘Only it’s not likely that this man is living in Moscow at present.’

‘That’s all right, sir. Since it will be a special rate, it’s quite all right. If your acquaintance is still in government service, I have lists of all the departments. If he is retired, then, of course, it will be difficult…’

‘He’s still in service, he is!’ Rybnikov assured the clerk. ‘And with a high rank. Perhaps even the equivalent of a general. He and my late father were in the Diplomatic Corps, but I heard that before that he was with the Police Department or, perhaps, the Gendarmes Corps. Perhaps he could have gone back to his old job?’ He delicately placed two paper roubles on the counter.

The clerk took the money and declared cheerfully:

‘It often happens that diplomats are transferred to the gendarmes and then back again. That’s government service for you. In what name does he rejoice? What is his age?’

‘Erast Fandorin. Fan-dor-in. He must be about forty-eight or forty-nine now. I was informed that he resides in St Petersburg, but that is not definite.’

The address wizard rummaged through his plump, tattered books for a long time. Every now and then he declared:

‘No one by that name listed with the ministry of foreign affairs… Not with Gendarmes Corps HQ… Not with the Railway Gendarmerie… At the ministry of internal affairs they have a Ferendiukin, Fedul Kharitonovich, director of the Detective Police Material Evidence Depot. Not him?’

Rybnikov shook his head.

‘Maybe you could look in Moscow? I recall that Mr Fandorin was a native Muscovite and resided here for a long period.’

He proffered another rouble, but the clerk shook his head with dignity.

‘A Moscow enquiry is two kopecks. My direct responsibility. I won’t take anything. Anyway, it only takes a moment.’ And indeed, he very soon declared: ‘No one by that name, either living or working here. Of course, I could look through previous years, but that would be by way of an exception…’

‘Fifty kopecks a year,’ replied the perspicacious client: it was a pleasure doing business with a man like him. At this point the enquiries started dragging on a bit. The clerk took out the annual directories volume by volume and moved from the twentieth century back into the nineteenth, burrowing deeper and deeper into the strata of the past.

Vasilii Alexandrovich had already reconciled himself to failure when the clerk suddenly exclaimed:

‘I have it! Here, in the book for 1891! That will be… er… seven roubles!’ And he read it out: ‘“E. P. Fandorin, state counsellor, deputy for special assignments to governor-general of Moscow. Malaya Nikitskaya Street, annexe to the house of Baron Evert-Kolokoltsev”. Well, if your acquaintance held a position like that fourteen years ago, he definitely must be an Excellency by now. Strange that I couldn’t find him in the ministry listings.’

‘It is strange,’ admitted Rybnikov, absentmindedly counting through the reddish notes protruding from his wallet.

‘You say the Department of Police or the gendarmes?’ the clerk asked, narrowing his eyes cunningly. ‘You know the way things are there: a man may seem to exist, and even hold an immensely high rank, but for the general public, it’s as if he didn’t exist at all.’

The customer batted his eyelids for a moment and then livened up a little.

‘Why, yes. My father said that Erast Petrovich worked on secret matters at the embassy!’

‘There, you see. And you know what… My godfather works just close by here, on Maly Gnezdnikovsky Lane. At the police telegraph office. Twenty years he’s been there, he knows everyone who’s anyone…’

There followed an eloquent pause.

‘A rouble for you, and one for your godfather.’

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ the clerk shouted at a peasant who had stuck his nose in at the door. ‘Can’t you see it’s half past one? It’s my lunch hour. Come back in an hour! And you, sir’ – this was to Vasilii Alexandrovich, in a whisper – ‘wait here. I’ll be back in a flash.’

Of course, Rybnikov did not wait in the office. He waited outside, taking up a position in a gateway. You could never tell. This petty bureaucrat might not be as simple as he seemed.

However, the precaution proved unnecessary.

The bureaucrat came back a quarter of an hour later, alone and looking very pleased.

‘A quite eminent individual! As they say, widely known in very narrow circles,’ he announced when Rybnikov popped up beside him. ‘Pantelei Ilich told me so much about your Fandorin! It turns out that he was a very important man. In the old days, under Dolgorukov.’

As he listened to the story of the former greatness of the governor’s special deputy, Vasilii Alexandrovich gasped and threw his hands up in the air, but the greatest surprise was waiting for him at the very end.

‘And you’re lucky,’ said the bureaucrat, flinging his arms wide dramatically, like a circus conjuror. ‘This Mr Fandorin of yours is in Moscow, he arrived from Peter. Pantelei Ilich sees him every day.’

‘In Moscow?’ Rybnikov exclaimed. ‘Really! Well, that is a stroke of luck. Do you know if he’ll be here long?’

‘No way of telling. It’s something highly important, government business. But Pantelei didn’t say what it was, and I didn’t ask. That’s not for the likes of us to know.’

‘Certainly, that’s right…’ There was a peculiar expression in Rybnikov’s slightly narrowed eyes as their glance slid over the other man’s face. ‘Did you tell your godfather that one of Erast Petrovich’s acquaintances was looking for him?’

‘No, I asked as if I was the one who was interested.’

He’s not lying, Vasilii Alexandrovich decided. He decided to keep both roubles for himself. His eyes widened again to assume their normal expression. And the clerk never knew that his little life had just been hanging on the very slimmest of threads.

‘It’s very good that you didn’t. I’ll arrange a surprise for him – in memory of my late dad. Won’t Erast Petrovich be delighted!’ Rybnikov said with a radiant smile.

But when he walked out, his face started twitching nervously.

That was the same day that Glyceria Romanovna came to their meeting with a new idea for saving Rybnikov: to appeal for help to her good friend, the head of the Moscow Gendarmes Office, General Charme. Lidina assured him that Konstantin Fyodorovich Charme was a dear old man whose name suited him perfectly, and he would not refuse her anything.

‘But what good will that do?’ asked Rybnikov, trying to fight her off. ‘My dear, I am a state criminal: I lost secret documents and I went on the run. How can your general of gendarmes help with that?’

But Glyceria Romanovna exclaimed heatedly:

‘You’re wrong! Konstantin Fyodorovich himself explained to me how much depends on the official who is assigned to handle a case. He can make things go badly or make them go well. Ah, if we could find out who is dealing with you!’

And then, giving way to the impulse of the moment, Vasilii Alexandrovich suddenly blurted out:

‘I do know. You’ve seen him. Do you remember, beside the bridge – that tall gentleman with the grey temples?’

‘The elegant one, in the light-coloured English coat? I remember, a very impressive man.’

‘His name is Fandorin, Erast Petrovich Fandorin. He has come to Moscow from St Petersburg especially to catch me. For God’s sake, don’t ask anyone to intercede – you’ll only make them suspect that you are harbouring a deserter. But if you could find out cautiously, in passing, what kind of man he is, what kind of life he leads, what his character is like, that might help me. Every little detail is important here. But you must act delicately!’

‘You men have nothing to teach us about delicacy,’ Lidina remarked condescendingly, already figuring out how she would go about this business. ‘We’ll set this misfortune right, just let me sleep on it.’

Rybnikov didn’t thank her, but the way he looked at her gave her a warm feeling in her chest. His yellow eyes no longer seemed like a cat’s, as they had during the first minutes of their acquaintance – she thought of them now as ‘bright coffee-coloured’ and found them very expressive.

‘You’re like the Swan Queen,’ he said with a smile. ‘“Dearest Prince, do not pine so, for this wonder I do know. In friendship’s name, do not be sad, I shall help you and be glad.”’

Glyceria Romanovna frowned.

‘Pushkin! I can’t stand him!’

‘What? But surely all Russians adore Pushkin, don’t they?’

Rybnikov suddenly realised that in his astonishment he had expressed himself rather awkwardly, but Lidina attached no importance to his strange words.

‘How could he write: ‘“Your end, your children’s death, with cruel joy I do behold”? What kind of poet is it that rejoices at the death of children? So much for “a star of captivating happiness”!’

And the conversation turned from a serious subject to Russian poetry, which Rybnikov knew quite well. He said that his father, a passionate admirer of Pushkin’s lyre, had cultivated the taste in him as a child.

And then 25 May had come, and Vasilii Alexandrovich had entirely forgotten the inconsequential conversation – there was more important business afoot.

The ‘dummies’ had been instructed to collect the packages from the left luggage office at dawn, just before they set off. The postman would cover the three crates with sackcloth, daub them with sealing wax and conceal them among his parcels – the best possible hiding place. Bridge’s job was even easier, because Vasilii Alexandrovich had done half the work for him: while riding in the closed wagon, he had tipped the melinite into eight cardboard boxes and wrapped each one in anthracite-black paper.

They were both going on the same eastbound express, only Bridge was travelling on his railway worker’s pass, in third class, and Tunnel was in the mail coach. Then their paths would part. The former would change to the locomotive of a freight train at Syzran, and in the middle of the Volga he would throw the boxes into the firebox. The latter would ride on as far as Lake Baikal.

For the sake of good order, Rybnikov decided to make certain that the agents collected the baggage by observing in person – naturally, without letting them see him.

As night was drawing to an end, he left the boarding house dressed in the style of a ‘little man’, with a crooked peaked cap and a collarless shirt under a jacket.

Casting a brief glance at the edge of the sky, which was just turning pink, he slipped into his role and jogged off along Chistoprudny Lane like a stray mongrel.

SHIMO-NO-KU

The first syllable, in which iron stars rain down from the sky

The putative Japanese had now been lost, and the Moscow Okhrana was tailing Thrush, so the efforts of the Petersburgians were concentrated entirely on the left luggage office. The items had been deposited there for twenty-four hours, which indicated that they would be called for no later than midday.

Fandorin and Mylnikov took up position in a secret observation post the evening before. As has already been mentioned, railway gendarmes were concealed in close proximity to the left luggage office, and Mylnikov’s agents were also taking turns to stroll around the square in front of the station, so the two bosses installed themselves comfortably in the premises of Lyapunov’s Funeral Services, which were located opposite the station, offering a superlative panoramic view. The American glass of the shop window was also very handy for their purpose, being funereal black and only allowing light through in one direction.

The two partners did not switch on the light – they had no real need for it anyway, since there was a street lamp burning nearby. The night hours dragged by slowly.

Every now and then the telephone rang – it was their subordinates reporting that the net had been cast, all the men were in position and vigilance was not slackening.

Fandorin and Mylnikov had already discussed everything to do with the job, but the conversation simply would not gel when it came to more abstract subjects – the ranges of the two partners’ interests were simply too different.

The engineer was not concerned, the silence did not bother him, but it drove the court counsellor wild.

‘Did you ever happen to meet Count Loris-Melikov?’ he asked.

‘Certainly,’ replied Fandorin, ‘but no more than that.’

‘They say the man had a great mind, even though he was Armenian.’

Silence.

‘Well, what I’m getting at is this. I’ve been told that before he retired His Excellency had a long tкte-а-tкte with Alexander III, and he made all sorts of predictions and gave him lots of advice: about a constitution, about concessions to foreigners, about foreign politics. Everyone knows the late tsar wasn’t exactly bright. Afterwards he used to laugh and say: “Loris tried to frighten me with Japan – just imagine it! He wanted me to be afraid of Japan”. That was in 1881, when no one even thought Japan was a proper country! Have you heard that story?’

‘I have had occasion to.’

‘See what kind of ministers Alexander II, the old Liberator, had. But Sandy number three had no time for them. And as for his son, our Nicky, well, what can you say… The old saying’s true: If He wants to punish someone, He’ll take away their reason. Will you at least say something! I’m talking sincerely here, straight from the heart. My soul’s aching for Russia.’

‘S-so I see,’ Fandorin remarked drily.

Not even taking a meal together brought them any closer, especially since each of them ate his own food. An agent delivered a little carafe of rowanberry vodka, fatty bacon and salted cucumbers for Mylnikov. The engineer’s Japanese servant treated him to pieces of raw herring and marinaded radish. Polite invitations from both parties to sample their fare were both declined with equal politeness. At the end of the meal, Fandorin lit up a Dutch cigar and Mylnikov sucked on a eucalyptus pastille for his nerves.

Eventually, at the time determined by nature, morning arrived.

The street lamps went out in the square, rays of sunlight slanted through the steam swirling above the damp surface of the road and sparrows started hopping about on the pavement under the window of the undertaker’s office.

‘There he is!’ Fandorin said in a low voice: for the last half-hour he had been glued to his binoculars.

‘Who?’

‘Our man. I’ll c-call the gendarmes.’

Mylnikov followed the direction of the engineer’s binoculars and put his own up to his eyes.

A man with a battered cap pulled right down to his ears was ambling across the broad, almost deserted square.

‘That’s him all right!’ the court counsellor said in a bloodthirsty whisper, and immediately pulled a stunt that was not envisaged in the plan: he stuck his head out through a small open windowpane and gave a deafening blast on his whistle.

Fandorin froze with the telephone receiver in his hand.

‘Have you taken leave of your senses?’

Mylnikov grinned triumphantly and tossed his reply back over his shoulder:

‘Well, what did you expect? Didn’t think Mylnikov would let the railway gendarmes have all the glory, did you? You can sod that! The Jap’s mine, he’s mine!’

From different sides of the square, agents dashed towards the little man, four of them in all. They trilled on their whistles and yelled menacingly.

‘Stop!’

The spy listened and stopped. He turned his head in all directions. He saw there was nowhere to run, but he ran anyway – chasing after an empty early tram that was clattering towards Zatsepa Street.

The agent running to cut him off thought he had guessed his enemy’s intentions – he darted forward to meet the tramcar and leapt nimbly up on to the front platform.

Just at that moment the Japanese overtook the tram, but he didn’t jump inside; running at full speed, he leapt up and grabbed hold of a rung of the dangling ladder with both hands, and in the twinkling of an eye, he was up on the roof.

The agent who had ended up inside the tram started dashing about between the benches – he couldn’t work out where the fugitive had disappeared to. The other three shouted and waved their arms, but he didn’t understand their gesticulations, and the distance between them and the tram was gradually increasing.

Spectators at the station – departing passengers, people seeing them off, cab drivers – gaped at this outlandish performance.

Then Mylnikov clambered out of the open window almost as far as his waist and howled in a voice that could have brought down the walls of Jericho:

‘Put the brake on, you idiot!’

Either the agent heard his boss’s howling, or he twigged for himself, but he went dashing to the driver, and immediately the brakes squealed, the tram slowed down and the other agents started closing in on it rapidly.

‘No chance, he won’t get away!’ Mylnikov boasted confidently. ‘Not from my aces he won’t. Every one of them’s worth ten of your railway boneheads.’

The tram had not yet stopped, it was still screeching along the rails, but the little figure in the jacket ran along its roof, pushed off with one foot, performed an unbelievable somersault and landed neatly on a newspaper kiosk standing at the corner of the square.

‘An acrobat!’ Mylnikov gasped.

But Fandorin muttered some short word that obviously wasn’t Russian and raised his binoculars to his eyes.

Panting for breath, the agents surrounded the wooden kiosk. They raised their heads, waved their arms, shouted something – the only sounds that reached the undertaker’s premises were ‘f***! – f***! – f***!’

Mylnikov chortled feverishly.

‘Like a cat on a fence! Got him!’

Suddenly the engineer exclaimed:

‘Shuriken!’

He flung aside his binoculars, darted out into the street and shouted loudly:

‘Look out!’

But too late.

The circus performer on the roof of the kiosk spun round his own axis, waving his hand through the air rapidly – as if he were thanking the agents on all four sides. One by one, Mylnikov’s ‘aces’ tumbled on to the paved surface.

A second later the spy leapt down, as softly as a cat, and dashed along the street towards the gaping mouth of a nearby gateway.

The engineer ran after him. The court counsellor, shocked and stunned for a moment, darted after him.

‘What happened? What happened?’ he shouted.

‘He’ll get away!’ Fandorin groaned.

‘Not if I have anything to do with it!’

Mylnikov pulled a revolver out from under his armpit and opened fire on the fugitive like a real master, on the run. He had good reason to pride himself on his accuracy, he usually felled a moving figure at fifty paces with the first bullet, but this time he emptied the entire cylinder and failed to hit the target. The damned Japanese was running oddly, with sidelong jumps and zigzags – how can you pop a target like that?

‘The bastard!’ gasped Mylnikov, clicking the hammer of his revolver against an empty cartridge case. ‘Why aren’t you firing?’

‘There’s no p-point.’

The shooting brought the gendarmes tearing out of the station after breaking their cover for the ambush. The public started to panic, there was shouting and jostling, and waving of umbrellas. Local police constables’ whistles could be heard trilling from various directions. But meanwhile the fugitive had already disappeared into the gateway.

‘Along the side street, the side street!’ Fandorin told the gendarmes, pointing. ‘To the left!’

The light-blue uniforms rushed off round the building. Mylnikov swore furiously as he clambered up the fire escape ladder, but Erast Petrovich stopped and shook his head hopelessly.

He took no further part in the search after that. He looked at the gendarmes and police agents bustling about, listened to Mylnikov’s howls from up above his head and set off back towards the square.

A crowd of curious gawkers was jostling around the kiosk, and he caught glimpses of a policeman’s white peaked cap.

As he walked up, the engineer heard a trembling, senile voice declaiming:

‘So is it said in prophecy: and iron stars shall rain down from the heavens and strike down the sinners…’

Fandorin spoke sombrely to the policeman:

‘Clear the public away.’

Even though Fandorin was in civilian garb, the policeman realised from his tone of voice that this man had the right to command, and he immediately blew on his whistle.

To menacing shouts of ‘Move aside! Where do you think you’re shoving?’ Fandorin walked round the site of the slaughter.

All four agents were dead. They were lying in identical poses, on their backs. Each had an iron star with sharp, glittering points protruding from his forehead, where it had pierced deep into the bone.

‘Lord Almighty!’ exclaimed Mylnikov, crossing himself as he walked up.

Squatting down with a sob, he was about to pull a metal star out of a dead head.

‘Don’t touch it! The edges are smeared with p-poison!’

Mylnikov jerked his hand away.

‘What devil’s work is this?’

‘That is a shuriken, also known as a syarinken. A throwing weapon of the “Furtive Ones”, a sect of hereditary sp-spies that exists in Japan.’

‘Hereditary?’ The court counsellor started blinking very rapidly. ‘Is that like our Rykalov from the detective section? His great-grandfather served in the Secret Chancellery, back in Catherine the Great’s time.’

‘Something of the kind. So that’s why he jumped on to the kiosk…’

Fandorin’s last remark was addressed to himself, but Mylnikov jerked his head up and asked:

‘Why?’

‘To throw at standing targets. You and your “cat on a fence”. Well, you’ve made a fine mess of things, Mylnikov.’

‘Never mind the mess,’ said Mylnikov, with tears coursing down his cheeks. ‘If I made it, I’ll answer for it, it won’t be the first time. Zyablikov, Raspashnoi, Kasatkin, Mцbius…’

A carriage came flying furiously into the square from the direction of Bolshaya Tartarskaya Street and a pale man with no hat tumbled out of it and shouted from a distance:

‘Evstratpalich! Disaster! Thrush has got away! He’s disappeared!’

‘But what about our plant?’

‘They found him with a knife in his side!’

The court counsellor launched into a torrent of obscenity so wild that someone in the crowd remarked respectfully:

‘He’s certainly making himself clear.’

But the engineer set off at a brisk stride towards the station.

‘Where are you going?’ shouted Mylnikov.

‘To the left luggage office. They won’t come for the melinite now.’

But Fandorin was mistaken.

The clerk was standing there, shifting from one foot to the other in front of the open door.

‘Well, did you catch the two boyos?’ he asked when he caught sight of Fandorin.

‘Which b-boyos?’

‘You know! The two who collected the baggage. I pressed on the button, like you told me to. Then I glanced into the gendarme gentlemen’s room. But when I looked, it was empty.’

The engineer groaned as if afflicted with a sudden, sharp pain.

‘How l-long ago?’

‘The first one came exactly at five. The second was seven or eight minutes later.’

Fandorin’s Breguet showed 5.29.

The court counsellor started swearing again, only not menacingly this time, but plaintively, in a minor key.

‘That was while we were creeping round the courtyards and basements,’ he wailed.

Fandorin summed up the situation in a funereal voice:

‘A worse debacle than Tsushima.’

The second syllable, entirely about railways

The interdepartmental conflict took place there and then, in the corridor. In his fury, Fandorin abandoned his usual restraint and told Mylnikov exactly what he thought about the Special Section, which was fine for spawning informers and agents provocateurs, but proved to be absolutely useless when it came to real work and caused nothing but problems.

‘You gendarmes are a fine lot too,’ snarled Mylnikov. ‘Why did your smart alecs abandon the ambush without any order? They let the bombers get away with the melinite. Now where do we look for them?’

Fandorin fell silent, stung either by the justice of the rebuke or that form of address – ‘you gendarmes’.

‘Our collaboration hasn’t worked out,’ said the man from the Department of Police, sighing. ‘Now you’ll make a complaint to your bosses about me, and I’ll make one to mine about you. Only none of that bumph is going to put things right. A bad peace is better than a good quarrel. Let’s do it this way: you look after your railway and I’ll catch Comrade Thrush. The way we’re supposed to do things according to our official responsibilities. That’ll be safer.’

Hunting for the revolutionaries who had established contact with Japanese intelligence obviously seemed far more promising to Mylnikov than pursuing unknown saboteurs who could be anywhere along an eight-thousand-verst railway line.

But Fandorin was so sick of the court counsellor that he replied contemptuously:

‘Excellent. Only keep well out of my sight.’

‘A good specialist always keeps out of sight,’ Evstratii Pavlovich purred, and he left.

And only then, bitterly repenting that he had wasted several precious minutes on pointless wrangling, did Fandorin set to work.

The first thing he did was question the receiving clerk in detail about the men who had presented the receipts for the baggage.

It turned out that the man who took the eight paper packages was dressed like a workman (grey collarless shirt, long coat, boots), but his face didn’t match his clothes – the clerk said he ‘wasn’t that simple’.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘He was educated. Glasses, hair down to his shoulders, a big, bushy beard like a church sexton. Since when does a worker or a craftsman look like that? And he’s ill. His face is all white and he kept clearing his throat and wiping his lips with a handkerchief.’

The second recipient, who had shown up a few minutes after the one in glasses, sounded even more interesting to the engineer – he spotted an obvious lead here.

The man who took away the three wooden crates had been dressed in the uniform of a railway postal worker! The clerk could not possibly be mistaken about this – he had been working in the Department of Railways for a good few years.

Moustache, broad cheekbones, middle-aged. The recipient had a holster hanging at his side, which meant that he accompanied the mail carriage, in which, as everybody knew, sums of money and precious packages were transported.

Fandorin could already feel a presentiment of success, but he suppressed that dangerous mood and turned to Lieutenant Colonel Danilov, who had just arrived.

‘In the last twenty minutes, since half past five, have any trains set off?’

‘Yes indeed, the Harbin train. It left ten minutes ago.’

‘Then that’s where they are, our boyos. Both of them,’ the engineer declared confidently.

The lieutenant colonel was doubtful.

‘But maybe they went back into the city? Or they’re waiting for the next train, to Paveletsk? It’s at six twenty-five.’

‘No. It is no accident that they showed up at the same time, with just a few minutes between them. That is one. And note what time that was – dawn. What else of any importance happens at this station between five and six, apart from the departure of the Harbin train? And then, of course, the third point.’ The engineer’s voice hardened. ‘What would saboteurs want with the P-Paveletsk train? What would they blow up on the Paveletsk line? Hay and straw, radishes and carrots? No, our subjects have gone off on the Harbin train.’

‘Shall I send a telegram to stop the train?’

‘Under no circumstances. There is melinite on board. Who knows what these people are like? If they suspect something is wrong, they might blow it up. No delays, no unscheduled stops. The bombers are already on their guard, they’re nervous. No, tell me instead where the first stop is according to the timetable.’

‘It’s an express. So it will only stop in Vladimir – let me just take a look… At nine thirty.’

The powerful locomotive commandeered by Danilov overhauled the Harbin express at the border of the province of Moscow and thereafter maintained a distance of one verst, which it only reduced just before Vladimir.

It came flying on to the next line only a minute after the express. Fandorin jumped down on to the platform without waiting for the locomotive to stop. The scheduled train halted at the station for only ten minutes, so every minute was precious.

The engineer was met by Captain Lenz, the head of the Vladimir Railway Gendarmes Division, who had been briefed about everything in detail by telephone. He goggled wildly at Fandorin’s fancy dress (greasy coat, grey moustache and eyebrows, with temples that were also grey, only there had been no need to dye them) and wiped his sweaty bald patch with a handkerchief, but did not ask any questions.

‘Everything’s ready. This way, please.’

He reported about everything else on the run, as he tried to keep up with Erast Petrovich.

‘The trolley’s waiting. The team has been assembled. They’re keeping their heads down, as ordered…’

The station postal worker, who had been informed of the basic situation, was loitering beside a trolley piled high with correspondence. To judge from the chalky hue of his features, he was in a dead funk. The room was packed with light-blue uniforms – all the gendarmes were squatting down, and their heads were bent down low too. That was so that no one would see them from the platform, through the window, Fandorin realised.

He smiled at the postal worker.

‘Calm down, calm down, nothing unusual is going to happen.’

He took hold of the handles and pushed the trolley out on to the platform.

‘Seven minutes,’ the gendarmes captain whispered after him.

A man in a blue jacket stuck his head out of the mail carriage, which was coupled immediately behind the locomotive.

‘Asleep, are you, Vladimir?’ he shouted angrily. ‘What’s taking you so long?’

Long moustache, middle-aged. Broad cheekbones? I suppose so, Erast Petrovich thought to himself, and whispered to his partner again:

‘Stop shaking, will you? And yawn, you almost overslept.’

‘There you go… Couldn’t keep my eyes open. My second straight day on duty,’ the Vladimir man babbled, yawning and stretching.

Meanwhile the disguised engineer was quickly tossing the mail in through the open door and weighing things up, wondering whether he should grab the man with the long moustache round the waist and fling him on to the platform. Nothing could be easier.

He decided to wait first and check whether there were three wooden crates measuring 15 Ч 10 Ч 15 inches in there.

He was right to wait.

He climbed up into the carriage and began dividing the Vladimir post into three piles: letters, parcels and packages.

The inside of the carriage was a veritable labyrinth of heaps of sacks, boxes and crates.

Erast walked along one row, then along another, but he didn’t see the familiar items.

‘What are you doing wandering about?’ someone barked at him out of a dark passage. ‘Get a move on, look lively! Sacks over this way, square items over there. Are you new, or something?’

This was a surprise: another postman, also about forty years old, with broad cheekbones and a moustache. Which one was it? A pity he didn’t have the clerk from the left luggage office with him.

‘Yes, I’m new,’ Fandorin droned in a deep voice, as if he had a cold.

‘And old too, from the look of you.’

The second postal worker came over to the first one and stood beside him. They both had holsters with Nagant revolvers hanging on their belts.

‘Why are your hands shaking -on a spree yesterday, were you?’ the second one asked the Vladimir man.

‘Just a bit…’

‘But didn’t you say this was your second day on duty?’ the first one, with the long moustache, asked in surprise.

The second one stuck his head out of the door and looked at the station building.

Which one of them? Fandorin tried to guess, slipping rapidly along the stacks. Or is it neither? Where are the crates of melinite?

Suddenly there was a deafening clang as the second postman slammed the door shut and pushed home the bolt.

‘What’s up with you, Matvei?’ the one with the long moustache asked, surprised again.

Matvei bared his yellow teeth and cocked the hammer of his revolver with a click.

‘I know what I’m doing! Three blue caps in the window, and all of them staring this way! I’ve got a nose for these things!’

Incredible relief was what Erast Petrovich felt at that moment – so he hadn’t wasted his time smearing lead white on his eyebrows and moustache and it had been worthwhile breathing locomotive soot for three hours.

‘Matvei, have you gone crazy?’ the one with the long moustache asked in bewilderment, gazing into the glittering gun barrel.

The Vladimir postal worker got the idea straight away and pressed himself back against the wall.

‘Easy, Lukich. Don’t stick your nose in. And you, you louse, tell me, is this loader of yours a nark? I’ll kill you!’ The subject grabbed the local man by the collar.

‘They made me do it… Have pity… I’ve only one year to go to my pension…’ said the local man, capitulating immediately.

‘Hey, my good man, don’t be stupid!’ shouted Fandorin, sticking his head out from behind the crates. ‘There’s nowhere you can go anyway. Drop the wea…’

He hadn’t expected that – the subject fired without even bothering to hear him out.

The engineer barely managed to squat down in time, and the bullet whistled by just above his head.

‘Ah, you stinking rat!’ Fandorin heard the man that the saboteur had called Lukich cry indignantly.

There was another crash, then two voices mingling together – one groaning, the other whining.

Erast Petrovich crept to the edge of the stack and glanced out.

Things had taken a really nasty turn.

Matvei was ensconced in the corner, holding the revolver out in front of him. Lukich was lying on the floor, fumbling at his chest with bloody fingers. The Vladimir postal worker was squealing with his hands up over his face.

Bluish-grey powder smoke swayed gently in the ghastly light of the electric lamp.

From the position that Fandorin had occupied, nothing could have been easier than to shoot the villain, but he was needed alive and preferably not too badly damaged. So Erast Petrovich stuck out the hand holding his Browning and planted two bullets in the wall to the subject’s right.

Exactly as required, the subject retreated from the corner behind a stack of cardboard boxes.

Shooting continuously (three, four, five, six, seven), the engineer jumped out, ran and threw himself bodily at the boxes – they collapsed, burying the man hiding behind them.

After that it took only a couple of seconds.

Erast Petrovich grabbed a protruding leg in a cowhide boot, tugged the saboteur out into the light of day (of the electric lamp, that is) and struck him with the edge of his hand slightly above the collarbone.

He had one.

Now he had to catch the other one, in glasses, who had collected the paper parcels.

Only how was he to find him? And was he even on the train at all?

But he didn’t have to search for the man in glasses – he announced his own presence.

When Erast Petrovich drew back the bolt and pushed open the heavy door of the mail carriage, the first thing he saw was people running along the platform. And he heard frightened screams and women squealing.

Captain Lenz was standing beside the carriage, looking pale and behaving strangely: instead of looking at the engineer, who had just escaped deadly danger, the gendarme was squinting off to one side.

‘Take him,’ said Fandorin, dragging the saboteur, who had still not come round, to the carraige door. ‘And get a stretcher here, a man’s been wounded.’ He nodded at the stampeding public. ‘Were they alarmed by the shots?’

‘No, not that. It’s a real disaster, Mr Engineer. As soon as we heard the shots, my men and I rushed out on to the platform, thinking we could help you… Then suddenly there was a wild, crazy howl from that carriage there…’ Lenz pointed off to one side. ‘“I won’t surrender alive!” That’s when it started…’

Two gendarmes lugged away Matvei, under arrest, and Erast Petrovich jumped down on to the platform and looked in the direction indicated.

He saw a green third-class carriage with not a single soul anywhere near it – but he glimpsed white faces with wide-open mouths behind the windows.

‘He has a revolver. And a bomb,’ Lenz reported hastily. ‘He must have thought we came dashing out to arrest him. He took the conductor’s keys and locked the carriage at both ends. There are about forty people in there. He keeps shouting: “Just try getting in, I’ll blow them all up!”’

And at that moment there was a blood-curdling shriek from the carriage.

‘Get back! If anybody moves, I’ll blow them all to kingdom come!’

However, he hasn’t blown them up yet, the engineer mused. Although he has had the opportunity. ‘I tell you what, Captain. Carry all the crates out of the mail carriage quickly. We’ll work out later which ones are ours. And observe every possible precaution as you carry them. If the melinite detonates, you’ll be building a new station afterwards. That is, not you, of course, b-but somebody else. Don’t come after me. I’ll do this alone.’

Erast Petrovich hunched over and ran along the line of carriages. He stopped at the window from which the threats to ‘blow everyone to kingdom come’ had been made. It was the only one that was half open.

The engineer tapped delicately on the side of the carriage: tap-tap-tap.

‘Who’s there?’ asked a surprised voice.

‘Engineer Fandorin. Will you allow me to come in?’

‘What for?’

‘I’d like to t-talk to you.’

‘But I’m going to blow everything in here to pieces,’ said the voice, puzzled. ‘Didn’t you hear that? And then, how will you get in? I won’t open the door for anything.’

‘That’s all right, don’t worry. I’ll climb in through the window, just don’t shoot.’

Erast Petrovich nimbly hauled himself up and in through the window as far as his shoulders, then waited for a moment, so that the bomber could get a good look at his venerable grey hair, before creeping into the carriage slowly, very slowly.

Things looked bad: the young man in spectacles had thrust his revolver into his belt, and he was holding one of the black packages. In fact, he had already thrust his fingers inside it – Fandorin assumed he was clutching the glass detonator. One slight squeeze and the bomb would detonate, setting off the other seven. There they were, on the upper bunk, covered with sackcloth.

‘You don’t look like an engineer,’ said the youth, as pale as death, examining the dusty clothing of the false loader.

‘And you don’t look like a p-proletarian,’ Erast Petrovich parried.

The carriage had no compartments; it consisted of a long corridor with wooden benches on both sides. Unlike the people clamouring on the platform, the hostages were sitting quietly – they could sense the nearness of death. There was just a woman’s voice tearfully murmuring a prayer somewhere.

‘Quiet, you idiot, I’ll blow the whole place up!’ the youth shouted in a terrible deep voice, and the praying broke off.

He’s dangerous, extremely dangerous, Fandorin realised as he looked into the terrorist’s wide, staring eyes. He’s not playing for effect, not throwing a fit of hysterics – he really will blow us up.

‘Why the delay?’ asked Erast Petrovich.

‘Eh?’

‘I can see that you are not afraid of death. So why are you putting it off? Why don’t you crush the detonator? There is something stopping you. What?’

‘You’re strange,’ said the young man in glasses. ‘But you’re right… This is all wrong. It isn’t how it should all happen… I’m selling myself cheap. It’s frustrating. And she won’t get her ten thousand…’

‘Who, your mother? Who will she not get the money from, the Japanese?’

‘What mother!’ the youth cried, gesturing angrily. ‘Ah, what a wonderful plan it was! She would have racked her brains, wondered who did it, where it was from. Then she would have guessed and blessed my memory. Russia would have cursed me, but she would have blessed me!’

‘The one you love?’ Fandorin said with a nod, starting to understand. ‘She is unhappy, trapped, this money would save her, allow her to start a new life?’

‘Yes! You can’t imagine what a hideous abomination Samara is! And her parents and brothers! Brutes, absolute brutes! Never mind that she doesn’t love me, that’s all right! Who could love a living corpse, coughing up his own lungs? But I’ll reach out to her even from the next world, I’ll pull her out of the quagmire… That is, I would have done…’

The young man groaned and started shaking so violently that the black paper rustled in his hands.

‘She won’t get the money because you failed to blow up the bridge? Or the tunnel?’ Erast Petrovich asked quickly, keeping his eyes fixed on that deadly package.

‘A bridge, the Alexander Bridge. How do you know that? But what difference does it make? Yes, the samurai won’t pay. I shall die in vain.’

‘So you are doing all this because of her, for the ten thousand?’

The youth in glasses shook his head.

‘Not only that. I want to take revenge on Russia. It’s a vile, abominable country!’

Fandorin sat down on the bench, crossed his legs and shrugged.

‘You can’t do Russia any great harm now. Well, you’ll blow up the carriage. Kill and maim forty poor third-class passengers, and the lady of your heart will be left to languish in Samara.’ He paused to give the young man a chance to reflect on that, then said forcefully: ‘I have a better idea. You give me the explosive, and then the girl you love will get her ten thousand. And you can leave Russia to her fate.’

‘You’ll deceive me,’ the consumptive whispered.

‘No. I give you my word of honour,’ said Erast Petrovich, and he said it in a voice that made it impossible not to believe.

Patches of ruddy colour bloomed on the bomber’s cheeks.

‘I don’t want to die in a prison hospital. Better here, now.’

‘Just as you wish,’ Fandorin said quietly.

‘Very well. I’ll write her a note…’

The youth pulled a notebook out of his pocket and scribbled in it feverishly with a pencil. The parcel with the bomb was lying on the bench and now Fandorin could easily have grabbed it. But the engineer didn’t budge.

‘Only, please, be brief,’ he said. ‘I feel sorry for the passengers. After all, every second is torment for them. God forbid, someone might have a stroke.’

‘Yes, yes, just a moment…’

He finished writing, folded the page neatly and handed it over.

‘It has the name and address on it…’

Only then did Fandorin take the bomb and hand it out through the window, after first calling the gendarmes. The other seven followed it: the youth in glasses took hold of them carefully and handed them to Erast Petrovich, who lowered them out through the window.

‘And now go out, please,’ said the doomed man, cocking the hammer of his revolver. ‘And remember: you gave your word of honour.’

Looking into the youth’s bright-blue eyes, Erast Petrovich realised that it was pointless to try to change his mind, and walked towards the door.

The shot rang out behind his back almost immediately.

The engineer arrived back at home, feeling weary and sad, as the day was ending. At the station in Moscow he was handed a telegram from Petersburg: ‘All’s well that ends well but we need the Japanese I hope the ten thousand is a joke’.

That meant he would have to pay the Belle Dame sans merci of Samara out of his own pocket, but that was not why he was feeling sad – he simply could not stop thinking about the young suicide, with all his love and hate. And Erast Petrovich’s thoughts also kept coming back again and again to the man who had thought of a way to make practical use of someone else’s misery.

They hadn’t learned much about this resourceful individual from the arrested postman. Nothing new at all, really. They still had no idea where to look for the man. And it was even more difficult to predict at which point he would strike his next blow.

Fandorin was met in the doorway of his government apartment by his valet. Observing neutrality had been particularly difficult for Masa today. All the time his master was away, the Japanese had muttered sutras and he had even tried to pray in front of an icon, but now he was the very image of dispassion. He ran a quick glance over Erast Petrovich to see whether he was unhurt. Seeing that he was, Masa screwed his eyes up in relief and immediately said indifferently in Japanese:

‘Another letter from the head of the municipal gendarmes.’

The engineer frowned as he unfolded the note, in which Lieutenant General Charme insistently invited him to come to dinner today at half past seven. The note ended with the words: ‘Otherwise, I really shall take offence’.

Yesterday there had been an identical invitation, left without a reply for lack of time.

It was awkward. An old, distinguished general. And in an adjacent government department – he couldn’t offend him.

‘Wash, shave, dinner jacket, white tie, top hat,’ the engineer told his servant in a sour voice.

The third syllable, in which Rybnikov gives free rein to his passion

On 25 May, Glyceria Romanovna drove along the boulevard in vain – Vasya did not come. This upset her, but not too badly. First, she knew where to find him now, and secondly, she had something to do.

Lidina drove straight from the boulevard to see Konstantin Fyodorovich Charme at his place of work. The old man was absolutely delighted. He threw some officers or other with documents out of his office, ordered hot chocolate to be served and was generally very sweet with his old-fashioned gallantry.

It was not at all difficult to turn the conversation to Fandorin. After idle chat about their common acquaintances in St Petersburg, Glyceria Romanovna told him how she had nearly been caught up in the appalling crash on the bridge, with graphic descriptions of what she had seen and what she had been through. She dwelt in detail on the mysterious gentleman with grey temples who was in charge of the investigation.

Just as Lidina had calculated, this emphatic epithet had its effect.

‘He may be mysterious to you, but not to me,’ the general said with a condescending smile. ‘That’s Fandorin from the Petersburg Railway Gendarmerie. Highly intelligent man, cosmopolitan, a great original. He’s handling a very important case in Moscow at present. I have been warned that my collaboration might be required at any moment.’

Glyceria Romanovna’s heart sank: ‘an important case’. Poor Vasya!

But she gave no sign of her dismay. Instead, she pretended to be curious:

‘Cosmopolitan? A great original? Ah, dear Konstantin Fyodorovich, introduce me to him! I know nothing is impossible for you!’

‘No, no, don’t even ask. Erast Petrovich has a reputation as a heartbreaker. Could it be that even you have not remained indifferent to his marble features? Take care, I shall become jealous and have you put under secret surveillance,’ the general threatened her jokingly.

But, of course, his stubbornness did not last long – he promised to invite the Petersburgian to dinner that very evening.

Glyceria Romanovna put on her silvery dress, the one which, in her own mind, she called ‘fatale’, scented herself with sensuous perfume and even made up her eyes a little, something that she usually did not do. She looked so fine that for five minutes she simply couldn’t go out on to the stairs – she carried on admiring herself in the mirror.

But the odious Fandorin did not come. Lidina sat there all evening, listening to the flowery compliments of her host and the conversations of his boring guests.

As they were saying goodnight, Konstantin Fyodorovich spread his hands and shrugged.

‘Your mystery man didn’t come. He didn’t even condescend to answer my note.’

She tried to persuade the general not to be angry – perhaps Fandorin was on an important investigation. And she said:

‘You have such a lovely home! And your guests are all so wonderful. I tell you what, arrange another dinner tomorrow, with the same set. And write a bit more determinedly to Fandorin, so that he will definitely come. Do you promise?’

‘For the pleasure of seeing you in my home again, I would do anything. But why are you so interested in Fandorin?’

‘It’s not a matter of him,’ said Lidina, lowering her voice confidentially. ‘It’s just idle curiosity. A caprice, if you like. It’s simply that I’m very solitary now, I need to be out in society more. I didn’t tell you. I’m leaving Georges.’

The general appreciated being taken into her confidence. Glancing round at his tedious wife, he immediately suggested lunch out of town the next day, but Glyceria Romanovna quickly scotched that. And in point of fact, the general was quite content with a little moderate flirtation with the attractive young woman; he had brought up the subject of lunch at the Yar restaurant only out of habit, like an old, retired hussar steed champing at the bit when he hears the distant sound of the bugle.

The next day Fandorin did come, although he was late. And in effect, nothing more was required of him – Lidina had no doubts about how charming she was. Today she looked every bit as fine as yesterday. Even finer, because she’d had the idea of putting on an embroidered Mauritanian cap and lowering a transparent, absolutely ethereal veil from it across her face.

The strategy she chose was the simplest, but it was certain.

At first she did not look at him at all, but she was amiable with the most handsome of the guests – a horse guardsman who was the governor-general’s adjutant.

Later she reluctantly acceded to her host’s repeated requests to perform Mr Poigin’s audacious romance ‘Do not go, stay a while with me’, accompanying herself on the piano. Glyceria Romanovna’s voice was not very strong, but it had a very pleasant timbre and its effect on men was infallible. As she sang the passionate promise to ‘quench languorous love with caresses of fire’, she looked by turn at all the men, apart from Fandorin.

When she calculated that the subject should be in the required state of readiness – that is, he should by now be sufficiently intrigued and piqued – Lidina gathered herself to strike the final blow and even set off towards the causeuse on which Fandorin was sitting, but their host spoiled her plan.

He walked over to the guest and struck up an idiotic conversation about work, praising some railway gendarmes captain called Lisitsky, who had come to him recently with a very interesting proposal – to set up a permanent station at the municipal telephone exchange.